TECHNIQUES OF DIPLOMATIC DISCOURSE TRANSLATION FROM RUSSIAN INTO ARABIC

Abstract

The aim of the given study consists in exploring the techniques of translation of the texts of Russian diplomatic discourse into Arabic. Full texts of speeches, speech transcripts and opening remarks of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation S. V. Lavrov published on the site of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 2004 to 2018 and the available translations of these texts into Arabic served as material of analysis. The paper also analyzes the quotations from S.V. Lavrov’s speeches translated into Arabic and published on other Arabic sites. The paper considers the interpretation of the terms of “translation techniques”, “translation transformations” and “translation equivalents” in the works on translation studies. In general, all the terms are used to denote various methods of changing the source text used by translators in their professional activity. As long as translation difficulties bring about the necessity to carry out interlingual changes demanding reorganization at different linguistic levels, the authors of the article prefer the term “transformations”. While considering translation equivalents, it is important to differentiate between microtranslation (regular equivalents for translation of the source language units by means of the corresponding target language units) and macrotranslation (non-regular equivalents, which are occasional and contextually bound). The analysis of translations of S. V. Lavrov’s speeches has shown that translators use some transformations. These transformations can be subdivided into lexical (transcriptions/transliterations while translating proper names and international words and loan translations), lexico-semantic (concretization, generalization, modulation), lexico-grammatical (antonymic translation - substitution of a negative construction by a positive one in the target language and vice versa -, compensation), and syntactic (word-for-word translation, permutation, substitution, sentence division, addition, omission, including stylistic correction of the source text containing pleonasms). While analyzing the translation transformations in the translations of the texts of S. V. Lavrov’s speeches, the authors noted the absence of two techniques: the technique of sentence uniting and the technique of descriptive translation. This fact can be explained by the accuracy typical of diplomatic discourse translation.