Specifics of rendering positive politeness in Ukrainian and Russian translations of English business letters

Abstract

The paper focuses on the analysis of transformations aimed at rendering the strategies of positive politeness in Ukrainian and Russian translations of English based business correspondence. The research purpose consists in revealing the markers of intensification and de-intensification of positive politeness. To achieve the purpose, the paper has applied the methodology composing of the methods of descriptive analysis, elements of comparative translation analysis as well as the explanatory tools of pragmatic analysis within the framework of "face and politeness" theory. The major findings refer to the identification of the translation transformations that affect the change in the scale of positive politeness towards its decrease or intensification. The transformations-based intensification of positive politeness is much less frequent than its weakening in favor of the negative politeness of "distance". This feature can be explained by the specifics of the genre of business correspondence characterized by stability, tradition, standardization, accuracy, objectivity, specificity, conciseness, lack of imagery and emotionality. The group of transformations, which de-intensify positive politeness, include the addition of "honor ific " adjective s Шановний and Уважаем ый – often in combination with honor ific lexemes пане or господин ; the grapho-stylistic foregrounding of the pronoun as capitalized ; the syntactic-grammatical re-categorization of a two-member sentence into a definite-personal sentence in combination with the syntactic transformation of omission of subject – personal pronoun and a part of the predicate, which distance the subject from his / her own discourse thus decreasing the scale of positive politeness as the politeness of proximity; grammatical transformation of the replacement of perfect time has been with the present simple. Intensifiers of positive politeness involve the omission of the modal verb should and grammatical re-categorization of the conditional into future tense – since both the modal verb and the conditional structure are hedges of varying complexity, and are considered markers of negative politeness; accordingly, their omission in translation results in a decrease in negative and an increase in positive politeness.