RENDERING ENGLISH UNIVERSAL PRONOUNS INTO UKRAINIAN: A CORPUS APPROACH

Abstract

The paper deals with investigation into the usage of English universal pronouns in contemporary fiction and their rendering into Ukrainian with employment of corpus approach. The universal pronouns under study were selected by the entire sampling method from the complete register compiled on the basis of the novel by J.K. Rowling “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” and its authorized Ukrainian version translated by V. Morozov. There were determined the lexico-semantic characteristics of four English universal pronouns (‘everybody’, ‘everyone’, ‘everything’, and ‘each’) based on monolingual dictionary entries’ analysis. Absolute and relative frequencies (per 1,000 words) of the above pronouns in the analyzed corpus fragment were calculated. The lexeme ‘each’ was found to be the most frequent, with ‘everybody’ being the least frequent. There were identified 12 semantic roles performed by the universal pronouns’ referents in the situations presented in the microcorpus, the agent and experiencer being the most frequent ones. The Ukrainian translation equivalents of the analyzed pronouns were determined based on bilingual dictionary entries’ analysis. By means of immediate constituents’ analysis and contextual analysis, there were described the peculiarities of the pronouns’ usage in the source text. The translation methods and types of translation shifts used for adequate rendering of the pronouns into Ukrainian were specified on the basis of transformational analysis. The most common methods of rendering the universal pronouns into Ukrainian were proved to be equivalent translation (65%), omission (21%) and lexical substitution (14%) (grammatical shifts and addition inclusive).