The specifics of rendering religious vocabulary in Chinese in the translation of Lesya Ukrainka’s poem “Babylonian Captivity”

Abstract

The dramatic poem “Babylon Captivity” was written on the basis of biblical themes, which were mainly related to the historical vicissitudes of life of the Jewish people. Thus, the drama was saturated with religious vocabulary, as well as many allusions to religion as a cultural phenomenon. In the poem “Babylon Captivity” religious vocabulary is mainly represented by biblical anthroponyms, terms to denote religious phenomena, events and rituals, spiritual concepts, as well as homologous phraseological units. The presence of religious markers in the text gives it a special color that the recipient – the native speaker of the original language – is able not only to feel but also to interpret. In the case of translation, such important layer of vocabulary, even with adequate translation, can be difficult for reception – especially in the case of remotely and ideologically distant cultures, because on the one hand to preserve the tonality of the original, and on the other – to adapt to the recipient’s worldview. It is noteworthy that the primary source for the Chinese translator was the English-language edition “Five Russian plays: with one from Ukrainian” (1916). Thus, the paper first considers and analyzes the process of indirect translation of Lesia Ukrainka’s work. The article pays special attention to the specifics of the Chinese translation of religious vocabulary (biblical, in particular) in Lesia Ukrainka’s poem “Babylon Captivity”, as well as the analysis of religious vocabulary through the prism of culturological comparative studies. Given the specifics of combining translation strategies and transformations, the accent was made on the method of renomination, used by a Chinese translator to replace “foreign” realities of the source text with “own” semantically close (but not identical) ones in the text of translation. Such approach allows not only to reduce information tension, but also to bring the work emotionally closer to the Chinese recipient.