Abstract
The focus of the paper is on ironic statements in Ukrainian media texts and their English translations. The theoretical framework underpinning the text analysis is Sperber and Wilson’s account of verbal irony as echoic allusion to an attributed proposition from which the speaker dissociates himself/herself, implicitly expressing a critical attitude (Wilson and Sperber 1992). The corpus of the present study consists of a series of ironic statements selected from three opinion articles published between 2010 and 2014 in a quality Ukrainian magazine having both Ukrainian and English versions. The paper explores how the ironic interpretation in each particular instance is consistent with the principle of relevance, and discusses implicatures communicated by the ironic statements. Then the focus shifts to the choices made by the translators in reproducing the irony in the target text. The study undertakes to assess how much the irony along with the implicatures is accessible to the target readers of the English translations, considering their cognitive environment. The results suggest that implicatures of ironic statements in the source and target texts do not coincide completely, with irony often being more pronounced in the English translation than in the Ukrainian original. At the same time, the value judgments communicated by the source ironic statements remain basically unchanged in the target text.
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