Translation as gestalt
Abstract
This article aims to integrate theoretical and methodological affordances of translation studies and cognitive linguistics to introduce a holistic methodology of translation analysis, which is based on the interpretation of the translated linguistic expression as one of the interconnected linguistic and non-linguistic (audio-visual and visual) exponents of a general gestalt meaning, which is constructed with the participation of all possible dimensions of the context: both linguistic (semantic-syntactic) and extralinguistic (situational and socio-cultural). The proposed procedure for translation analysis includes: 1) a description of the situational and socio-cultural context in which the action/event, actualized by the analysed verbal-visual utterance, takes place; 2) clarification of the contribution all the interconnected lexical-phraseological and grammatical, as well as visual exponents make into the construction of the gestalt meaning of the original and translated utterances. The application of the proposed methodology to the analysis of the subtitling of Sherlock Holmes' speech in the British mini-series Sherlock revealed a tendency to preserve rational propositional content while losing modal emotional-evaluative shades of meaning, which is manifested in: 1) simplification of the syntactic structure of the original speech, which, however, does not reduce the accuracy of the reproduction of the rational propositional content; 2) refusal to translate particles and modal verbs that complicate the predicate and participate in constructing certainty degrees of deductive assumptions, as well as irony and sarcasm, which is partially compensated by the visuals and the soundtrack; 3) preservation of the illustrative correspondence of the image and speech, but the loss of verbal-visual puns due to the use of Ukrainian equivalents, which holistically rethink the referential situation, reflecting its meaning, but consist of words of completely different semantics compared to the original.
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