RETENTION OF THE TOUCH SYNESTHETIC METAPHORS IN ENGLISH-UKRAINIAN TRANSLATIONS OF FICTION

Abstract

Purpose. The purpose of the article is to establish and analyse the cases of synesthesia metaphors retention in English-Ukrainian translations, in which “less embodied” hearing, smell and taste sensations are mapped on “more embodied” touch sensations. Methods. Synesthesia is understood as a kind of conceptual metaphor within cognitive linguistics. Research methods applied in the article are based on the achievements of cognitive linguistics and the methodology introduced and developed by L. Kovalenko and A. Martyniuk (Kovalenko, Martynyuk, 2018), which allows us to study mental models underlying metaphorical descriptions and establish the type of cognitive operation employed by the translator. We define the cognitive operation of retention following Shuttleworth’s classification (Shuttleworth, 2017) as “translation that is essentially unchanged”. The degree of conventionality and rootedness of metaphorical models in English-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking linguistic cultures is determined within the theory of probability and statistical data obtained from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the General Regional Annotated Corpus of Ukrainian (ГРАК). The research material for the article encounters 100 English synesthetic metaphoric descriptions, extracted from Celeste Ng’s bestseller novels “Everything I Never Told You” (Ng, 2014) and “Little Fires Everywhere” (Ng, 2017) and retained in their Ukrainian translations (Інг, 2016; 2018). Results. The study results are presented by the detailed analysis of synesthetic metaphorical models’ retention examples, such as HEARING / SMELL / TASTE IS TOUCHING SOFT / SHARP / HOT SURFACE. In our article, the study of synesthetic metaphoric descriptions relative frequencies showed the semantic features, which are common and divergent in their meanings for the representatives of English and Ukrainian linguacultures. Conclusions. The conducted analysis showed that synesthetic metaphoric models are retained when the difficulties faced by the translator are minimal or absent. In this case, the translator resorts to translation with a direct dictionary equivalent. Synesthetic metaphoric models with similar conventionality degrees are retained.