Lexico-Structural Characteristics of Aviation Terminology and Techniques of its Transmission Into the Russian Language

Abstract

The article discusses the lexical and structural characteristics of aviation terminology and the methods of its translation into Russian, the features of terminology functioning, and the specifics of translation. A scientific and technical text is presented as a communicative unit, a source of replenishment and knowledge exchange between professionals of a certain field of science and technology, a synthesis of the scientific and the technical; both linguistic and extralinguistic factors are considered. Linguists’ points of view regarding the characteristics of scientific and technical texts are taken into account. The goal of this paper is to study the functioning of aviation terminology and the ways of its translation into Russian. A scientific and technical text is considered as the sphere with specific terminological units, and names of processes and phenomena, however, the consistent and logical nature of the presentation of the subject matter in a scientific and technical text does not exclude the presence of such lexical units as neologisms, phraseological units, vocabulary of foreign origin, abbreviations and acronyms. Aviation technologies abbreviations are full-fledged lexical units used as a means to economize linguistic means and as part and parcel of a technical text. The difficulties connected with the stylistic, lexical and syntactic features of the scientific and technical text are associated with the use of passive constructions, inversions typical of the analytical English language. Metaphorical means are identified as a source of terminology, which is proved by the adduced examples. Finding translation solutions when transferring the meanings of aviation terminology, and the selection of the required equivalent is the primary task of a full-fledged translation and an urgent problem of modern translation studies. The main task of the translator, who is not an expert in aviation technologies, when transferring the meanings of the term from English into Russian, is to achieve maximum semantic adequacy in translation. The difficulties encountered by the translator when translating aviation texts containing differently-structured terminological units are considered; the difficulties of translation are attributed to the absence of an equivalent in the translating language and may also be connected with determining the referent for designating the object in question, or may be associated with the syntactic difference between the English (analytical) and the Russian (synthetic) languages. The processing of language material makes it possible to determine the characteristic structural types of terminological units and to identify the most appropriate techniques of translation, such as formal, lexical and grammatical, in order to select the most appropriate equivalent to achieve a full-fledged translation option.