Strategies and methods of English-Ukrainian translation of verbal instantiation of fiction simile etalons

Abstract

This article analyses strategies and methods of English-Ukrainian translation of the names of fiction simile etalons. The topicality of the research results from the fact that English-Ukrainian translations of fiction simile etalons have not been investigated with the account of the simile cognitive models that determine the form and content of their verbal instantiation. The aim of the article is to find correlation between methods / strategies and techniques / transformations in rendering English instantiations of fiction simile etalons into Ukrainian, applying cognitive and structural-semantic translation analyses. The research has discovered three methods used to translate English names of the simile etalons into Ukrainian: faithful, adaptive and communicative. The faithful method correlates with the foreignization translation strategy and presupposes reconstructing the original cognitive models, even if they are not rooted in the culture of translation. The faithful method is applied in its formal (use of structural transformations of transliteration or transcription, which demands introduction of translation commentaries, or explication) and semantic (use of vocabulary equivalents) varieties. The adaptive method correlates with the domestication translation strategy and involves replacing or reconstructing the original simile cognitive model, eliminating the simile or introducing a new simile into the text of translation. The adaptive method manifests itself as formal adaptation (use of structural-functional elements that have no analogues in the original), semantic adaptation (use of semantic transformations of contextual substitution or holistic transformation) and stylistic adaptation (substitution of linguistic units of neutral register with stylistically marked ones). The communicative method does not presuppose making choice between domestication and foreignization, since it is used to translate similes resting on cognitive models that are common for the cultures of the original and translation.