The usage of Ukrainian reflexive pronouns in english fantasy fiction translation

Abstract

The article deals with the usage of the Ukrainian reflexive pronoun (RP) “себе (собі, собою)” in implementing methods and strategies of English fiction translation for the purpose of generalizing the translator’s experience at the post-translation stage. The object of the investigation is the target-text units containing the Ukrainian RPs; the subject is the RPs’ functional and semantic properties, and translation methods and strategies involving the RPs in the target text. The research is based on original text fragments selected by entire sampling from the novel “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” by J.K. Rowling and its authorized Ukrainian translation by V. Morozov. The target is to identify translation methods and reconstruct local strategies applied in the translation. The objectives are: 1) to compile a full register of the RPs; 2) to define their structural-semantic properties and establish standard English translation equivalents; 3) to determine the RPs’ syntactic functions and semantic roles in the target text; 4) to specify translation shifts, methods and local strategies; 5) to identify the types of English-Ukrainian translation of the RP-containing units. The methods include: 1) entire sampling; 2) monolingual & bilingual dictionary entries’ analysis; 3) immediate-constituent analysis; 4) contextual analysis; 5) translation transformational analysis; 6) sentence parsing procedure; 7) quantity calculations. In the course of the investigation, 132 RP-containing fragments were selected by entire sampling; the RPs’ structural-semantic properties and standard translation equivalents were determined; their syntactic functions and semantic roles were identified; translation shifts, methods, local strategies and types of translation were specified. As a result, the RPs have been found in: 1) five grammar cases, viz. genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental and locative, the most frequent being the dative & accusative cases; 2) five syntactic functions, i.e. direct, indirect & prepositional object, adverbial modifier & modifying particle, the most recurrent ones being prepositional and indirect object; 3) 14 semantic roles, the most frequent being locative, experiencer and recipient. The translation methods involving the RPs have been proved to be equivalent translation, lexical substitution and addition, the latter being the most recurrent one. Three types of local translation strategies have been identified, namely: semantic strategies involving transposition, modulation, synonymy, hyponymy, hypernymy, related & unrelated word paraphrase; syntactic strategies employing phrase, clause & sentence structure shifts, and pragmatic strategy of explicitness increase, which in numerous combinations correlate with such translation types as source text oriented literal and semantic translation, and target text oriented communicative translation.