RENDERING LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL REALIA IN UKRAINIAN TRANSLATION OF ENGLISH ALLUSIONS

Abstract

The paper is focused on the study of linguistic means of rendering lingual and cultural realia conveyed by allusions in English political speeches and their Ukrainian translation. It is argued that allusions are among those linguistic means which not only provide the factual information, but also carry nationallymarked load. The authors maintain that despite the presence of some fundamental studies devoted to structural and semantic aspects of allusions, the ways of preserving and reflecting certain lingual and cultural information in the Ukrainian translations of English texts, the issue of rendering this information conveyed by allusions in the texts of English (American) political speeches has not been sufficiently investigated. Thus, the aforementioned justifies the urgent character of the given research. The work aimed at determining the tactics and linguistic means of representing lingual and cultural realia in the texts of English inaugural speeches and their Ukrainian translations. The conducted study revealed that allusions in the analyzed texts render lingual and cultural information alluding to both textual and non-textual referents. The textual referents are represented by one’s own previous speeches, speeches of other politicians, biblical texts, folklore works, texts of state documents etc.; non-textual referents are the names of historical events, historical buildings, geographical features etc. The difficulty in preserving the lingual and cultural information in the translation can be justified by several factors, such as difficulties with identifying allusions in the text in case of non-nominated allusions as well as selection of the appropriate tactics of translation. The analysis proved that the linguistic and cultural information contained in allusions is mostly preserved in Ukrainian translations of the corresponding English-language texts of political speeches. Herewith, the kind of translation tactics and techniques depend on the type of the allusion — direct allusions are most commonly translated with the employment of transcription, transliteration, translation loans; indirect allusions — by means of contextual substitution, transposition, extension and omission.