Translation strategies for rendering interjections from Dutch into Russian in translation of comics

Abstract

The growing popularity of online communication, where participants increasingly convey their feelings and emotions using minimal characters, has significantly increased the role of interjections in modern language. This research is based on the translation into Russian of the comic book Het Amusement by the Flemish author Brecht Evens (translated by E. Tortsyna). In the comics, the use of interjections, alongside graphic techniques, plays an extremely important role. When rendering interjections, the translator relies primarily on the context. The translation strategy is connected with the search for a word or expression, which will preserve the semantic, stylistic and functional-communicative information contained in the original. The language of the comic book under study demonstrates the features of the southern variant of colloquial Dutch (tussentaal, ‘intermediate language’), first of all, at the level of interjections, which in the southern variant differ from the “northern” ones. The results of the study consist in a systematised review of the ways of rendering Dutch interjections into Russian, with an important role given to the functional-semantic characteristics of these lexical units. Both primary and secondary interjections are of particular interest when studying the problem of interjection translation, as in some cases, the internal form of a secondary interjection in the original does not coincide with the internal form of an interjection chosen by the translator. The omission of an interjection is also an interesting technique, where there is a redistribution of the expressive nuances of an original interjection among elements of the utterance in the translated text.