THE WORD ‘BROWN’ AS A HORSE COLOUR NAME: SEMANTICS AND WAYS OF TRANSLATION

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of translation of the word brown as a member of the lexico-semantic group horse colour. This study aims at comprehensive description of the semantics of the said word, supported with references to definitions from specialized literature on horse genetics. The article also describes the possible variants of translation of the word brown into Russian, since there is no single equivalent. To achieve this goal, the word in question is analyzed with the use of an English and parallel Russian-English corpora. The degree of equivalence of the word brown and its Russian counterparts is established through comparison of word definitions from different sources. This study is carried out with the use of the following methods: the method of continuous sampling for data collection from English and Russian corpora, the comparative method for establishing the degree of equivalence among horse colour names, the method of analysis for processing the results of the comparison, the method of synthesis for comprehensive description of the ways of translation of the word brown. The materials for this study include works on horse colour genetics, horse colour reference charts and encyclopedias. The examples are provided by the Russian National Corpus (parallel subcorpus) and the iWeb Corpus of the English language. Some examples have been processed without the use of a corpus, which is reflected in the inclusion of works of fiction to the reference list. This study adds new information to the available data on the word brown as a horse colour name. The methodological novelty of this work is the use of the corpora to analyze a specific horse colour name and its representation in fiction.