Rendering English indefinite pronominal adverbs of place into Ukrainian

Abstract

The article is dedicated to translation methods and strategies in English-Ukrainian rendering of indefinite pronominal adverbs of place somewhere, anywhere, everywhere, nowhere & wherever in fantasy fiction at the post-translation stage of generalizing the translator’s experience. A complete register of 35 adverbs under study (100%) was compiled by entire sampling from text fragments of the novel “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” by J.K. Rowling and its authorized Ukrainian version translated by V. Morozov. Based on monolingual & bilingual dictionary entries’ analysis, functional-semantic properties and standard translation equivalents of the lexemes were determined. By means of contextual and immediate constituents’ analyses, including sentence parsing procedure, their semantic roles and syntactic functions in the source text were identified. With the aid of translation transformation analysis, a number of grammatical shifts, translation methods and local strategies implemented to reach equivalence and adequacy in rendering the analysed language units into Ukrainian were specified, as well as relevant types of translation were defined. As a result of the investigation, the lexemes under analysis have been found pertaining to three functional-semantic classes, including pronominal adverb (77.1%), pronoun (20%) and conjunction (2.9%). Four semantic roles of the lexemes’ referents in ‘state of affairs’ situations of fictional discourse have been identified, namely: location (42.9%), direction (28.6%), destination (11.4%) and source (17.1%), corresponding to such semantic cases as locative (42.9%), allative (40%), and ablative (17.1%). In the source text, the lexemes have been registered in the syntactic functions of adverbial modifier of place (85.7%), manner (11.4%) and attendant circumstances (2.9%). The translation methods of rendering the relevant units into Ukrainian have been found to be direct and oblique literal translation by equivalent (37.1%), lexical substitution (34.3%) and omission (28.6%). Correspondingly, the principal translation strategies have been proved to be: 1) semantic strategies, comprising related and unrelated word paraphrase (28.6%), emphasis change (5.7%) and synonymy (2.9%); 2) syntactic strategies, including phrase, clause & sentence structure changes (48.6%), literal translation (37.1%) and modulation (17.1%); and 3) pragmatic strategy of explicitness change (11.4%), the most frequent ones being phrase structure change, oblique literal translation and paraphrase. It has been proved that equivalence and adequacy of translation is attained via combination of source text oriented (60%) and target text oriented strategies (40%), in particular the source text oriented literal and semantic translation (37.1% and 22.9% respectively), and the target reader oriented communicative translation (40% of cases).