Lexical Transformations In The French Translation Of A. S. Pushkin’S “The Captain’S Daughter”

Abstract

This article presents a research that is aimed at discovering translational transformations and infelicities on the lexical level in the French translation of the novel “The Captain’s Daughter” by A.S. Pushkin. The relevance of this article is explained by the controversy between the growing interest to literary fiction of Russian classic authors and their translations (not always of high quality). In the research we use the methods of componential analysis, continuous sampling, comparative and mathematical data processing. The article contains a brief review of literature on the issue of interpreting translational transformations. The authors suggest an algorithm to prepare for translating a literary text to the French language in the given article. The completed qualitative and quantitative analysis of lexical transformations in the translation proves that the most frequent translational transformations are: substitution, addition, omissions and transpositions. The reasons of the decrease in the quality of translations are discovered to be the following: difficulties in translating non-equivalent lexis, geographical names, objects of culture and household, proverbs and idioms, as well as presence of implicit information. The authors of the research suggest variants of translation for the sentences that are absent in the authentic text, as well as the fragments of the literary text containing discrepancies and mistakes in the target language (French). Further development of the research requires elaboration of the issue of translational transformations on the syntactic level.