Вackground. The article examines the pragmatic functions of the indefinite article in Spanish with a view to its teaching to students of translation studies at higher educational institutions. The study focuses on the fact that the Spanish article is capable not only of indicating the uncertainty of the subject, but also of conveying various pragmatic information or even acquiring metaphorical meanings depending on the existing communicative situation. The didactic goal of the study is to develop students' ability to perceive the grammatical category of the article from the point of view of a native Spanish speaker, which will improve its understanding for use and further reproduction in Ukrainian translation. Methods. A number of methods have been used to highlight the problem, namely descriptive method, contrastive or comparative method, the methods of linguistic and contextual interpretive analysis, as well as the method of generalization of the data. The article is of a review nature with the aim of generalising the issue. Results. The main cases of the use of the indefinite article in Spanish are analyzed for the presence of pragmatic functions, in particular, its use to indicate uncertainty or quantity of a noun, to introduce new information, to indicate belonging to a certain group, to add characteristics to an object or phenomenon, as well as for emphasis. The article reveals the pragmatic potential of the article in the original, which is important and sometimes necessary to preserve in the target text during translation. It is established that the translation transformation of deleting the article without adding lexical means in the target text due to the absence of this category in Ukrainian grammar is an ambiguous decision, which leads to the loss of the pragmatic component in the Ukrainian translation or even to a change in the content of the Spanish message. Possible ways to solve the problem of reproducing different meanings of the indefinite article are proposed, including the addition of appropriate lexical and lexico-grammatical means, changing the order of words in a sentence, transposition or explication. Conclusions. The grammatical category of the article in Spanish has a wide potential for expressing additional pragmatic meanings that have semantic, stylistic, emphatic, expressive, evaluative or metaphorical load. In Ukrainian translation, the reproduction of additional pragmatic meanings of the article is difficult, which leads to certain losses in the target text. To ensure an adequate reproduction of the Spanish message, the translator must acquire sufficient linguistic competence to understand the nature of the Spanish indefinite article and see it from the point of view of a native Spanish speaker. This will allow them to identify pragmatic meanings in the text and reproduce them in Ukrainian.
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Sep 30, 2024
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Open Access