Published 2021-09-29
Keywords
- allusive simile, cognitive translation analysis, idiomatic simile, non-idiomatic simile, translation procedure, translation strategy
Abstract
The purpose of the article is to establish correlations between the presence or absence of cultural specificity of a source-text simile and its replacement with a target-text simile based on a different cognitive model. The paper rests on D. Tartt’s and M. Atwood’s novels and their translations.
Methods. The research employs structural-semantic translation analysis, which allows identifying translation transformations, and cognitive translation analysis, which allows constructing cognitive propositional models of the source-text and target-text fiction similes and reveal if they are culturally specific. A simile is defined as an explicit conceptual metaphor, after G. Lakoff and M. Johnson. Cognitive propositional model of the simile is “A is like B”, where “A” and “B” are the target and source domains/concepts respectively. The research addresses the concepts of translation procedure, translation transformation and translation strategy. A translation procedure is conceived as a process of solving a translation problem, a translation transformation – as converting a text unit from one language to another and a translation strategy – as a translator’s general plan of action. Translation transformations are studied as specific linguistic instantiations of translation procedures.
Results. The study differentiates between idiomatic, non-idiomatic and allusive conventional similes. It has been revealed that replacement of English fiction simile mappings applies to idiomatic, non-idiomatic and allusive similes and is embodied in the Ukrainian language by culturally specific idiomatic similes.
Conclusions. Replacement of fiction simile mappings is carried out by means of lexical-grammatical transformation of holistic substitution, which serves the strategy of domestication. The domestication strategy is compulsory if the translator is limited in making decisions by linguistic and cultural specificity of the English simile, as in the case of idiomatic similes, and it is optional in the case of non-idiomatic or allusive similes that are devoid of linguacultural specificity.