Учебно-методический комплекс дисциплины «Иностранный язык» для специальностей магистратуры

Literature.

1. Smith L. «Words and Idioms».1928

2. Smith L. «Words and Idioms». 1976

3. Collins V. «А Book of English Idioms» 1981

4. Смирницкий А. «Лексикология английского языка» М.,1996

5. Arnold I.V. The English Word . M. 1986.

6. Кунин А.В.Англо-русский фразеологический словарь, М., 1956

7. Смирницкий А.И. Лексикология английского языка. М., 1956.

8. Виноградов В.В. Лексикология и лексикография: Избр. Тр. - М.: Наука, 1986.

9. Hornby A. The Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Lnd. 1974.

10. Англо-русский фразеологический словарь. М., 1955

11. Aмосова Н. Н. Основы английской фразеологии Л. 1963.

12.www.bohemika.com – Phraseological combinations and fusions.

13.www.schwabe.ch – Phraseological Units.

14.www.corpus.bham.ac.uk – the Determination of Phraseological Units.

15. http://www.ranez.ru/article

Though not pretending completeness, I hope the readers will find this article helpful in understanding the essence of some semantic correspondences in the English and Russian verbal systems. It is common knowledge that in order to provide an adequate translation, the translator must be able to sense nuances in the semantics of both the source-language and target-language texts. English phrasal verbs (e.g. give up, break in, fall out) are of great interest to me in this respect because they possess quite a number of semantic, grammatical and stylistic peculiarities, sometimes making their accurate translation into Russian difficult. Of course, in dealing with the translation of such lexical units into his or her native language, the translator can consult the appropriate bilingual dictionary, but what about the profound comprehension of why this or that phrasal verb is translated only this and not any other way?

To get a good idea of English phrasal verbs' semantic nuances, let us first look at their conceptual features. In theory, phrasal verbs are generally considered to be idiomatic combinations of a verb and an adverbial particle. The exact status of the latter is still being debated, scholars being divided on whether it is an adverb, prepositional adverb, postpositional prefix, special part of speech, etc. However, here we are interested only in the features of adverbial particles.

In general, the main function of phrasal verbs is conceptual categorization of reality in the speaker's mind. They denote not only actions or states as "ordinary" verbs do, but also specify their spatial, temporal or other characteristics. This ability to describe actions or states more precisely, vividly and emotionally is determined by the adverbial components of phrasal verbs. By combining with these elements, verbs of broader meaning are subjected to a regular and systematic multiplication of their semantic functions. While the English verb has no consistent structural representation of aspect, adverbial particles either impart an additional aspective meaning to the base verb (e.g. the durative verb sit merges with the particle down into the terminative phrasal verb sit down) or introduce a lexical modification to its fundamental semantics. In most cases adverbial elements denote the general spatial direction of the action or express its qualitative or quantitative characteristics, like beginning (set out), duration (bum along), completion (think out), intensity (hurry up), and so on.

The sentences "There was a little fire there. Nancy built it up, when it was already hot inside" [W. Faulkner, That Evening Sun] have the following translation: «В очаге еще были горячие угли, она их раздула, и пламя вспыхнуло". The adverbial particle up in the phrasal verb build up imparts the idea of increasing the size of the fire and shows the intensification of the action. According to the definition given in the Oxford Russian Dictionary, the most appropriate Russian prefix should be "раз-", indicating the intensification of action.

English phrasal verbs can be highly idiomatic, their meanings being unpredictable from the sum of their constituents' meanings (e.g. take in (to deceive), lay down (to build), let on (to tell a secret). In such cases, where the context or professional experience fail to reveal the sense of a phrasal verb, a good explanatory or bilingual dictionary can be of great help to the translator. For example, for a person who is not a native speaker of English, in the sentence "He liked to break in his assistants slowly" neither the context, nor the adverbial element of the phrasal verb hint at the real meaning of the combination break in. According to the Longman Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs, the phrasal verb break in has the following "unexpected" meaning: 4. to help (smb) to become accustomed (to work, etc.) . The Russian edition of this very dictionary (Английские фразовые глаголы. Англо-русский словарь, Russkiy Yazyk Publishers, Moscow, 1997) treats this meaning in the same way: 4. вводить (кого-л.) в курс (новой работы и т.п.).

We are aware that Venuti's call for resistive translation refers primarily to certain literary and cultural texts. We apologize for using his argument as a foil for our own. Venuti is correct in his analysis of the potential for harm in translation, and he focuses, as we do, on the effects of the translation process on textual form. Too many theorists focus on the translation process alone. They act as if process could be separated from text. The text is the central defining issue in translation. Texts and their situations define the translation process. We cannot generalize about translation without speaking of specific texts embedded in specific situations.

There is no single translation process. There are many translation processes. Translation is an intersection of situation, translator competence, source text, and target text-to-be. There are translation situations where the destructive impact of translation on cultural values is not important. There are other situations where it may be the central issue. Some translation is critical and interpretive; it is not pragmatic. This kind of translation is driven by different motivating factors. The messages and forms of the texts are more closely connected. Other texts participate in practical communication. They exchange primarily value-free technical, scientific, and commercial information. The foreignness of the source text is not a benefit in these translations. Because most practical texts have a user orientation, the foreignness of the source text is an obstacle to overcome.

The translation situation always determines the set of translation strategies to be used. Translation appears to be a single process, but it actually refers to a set of situation-specific processes. Here we have another paradox of translation.

Venuti makes the case himself when he says "as conceptual fields in which a translation is produced, fluency and resistancy . . . are determined by the particular conjuncture where they are developed and used, and their ideological significance is not only defined in relation to that conjuncture, but influenced by the ideology of the source-language text that they process" (Venuti 1986, 191).

There are common features which all the possible translation processes share. There are also differences which distinguish them. Some differences are related to variations in the translation situation. Others are caused by the diverse information contents of source texts. Authors may have different intentions and readers can have different needs. There are always cultural differences in linguistic and conceptual systems. Finally, there are differences in what people expect translations to look like. One of the goals of translation studies should be to describe the varieties of translation that result from real combinations of these translation variables. Translation scholars need to look at real translation practice.

Translation reality is rarely studied. Instead, we have studied armchair conceptualizations of translation. What translation scholars need to do, and have started to do over the past decade, is focus on the varieties of translation that actually exist. They need to look at what happens to source texts during translation and describe the influence of cultural, linguistic, and textual factors on the processes and results of translation.

Translation studies today is a cluster of overlapping perspectives. There is no unified way of approaching the study of translation. Practitioners and scholars stake out certain territories and construct their own isolated understandings of translation reality. Many of these perspectives are non-empirical. They are derived from disparate sources. Some come from models in other disciplines. Others come from metaphors and introspection. Each perspective emphasizes a different aspect of translation. Translation invites and recommends a variety of theoretical and methodological responses.

For instance, a scholar may focus on the source text in its sociocultural setting. This source-centered perspective will focus on the domestication of the source text by the target language. The translator plays the role of linguistic lion tamer. From this perspective, resistive translation makes sense. The utility of resistive translation dissipates when the perspective shifts. Resistant translation cannot be proposed as a universal strategy, but there are translation situations and translation needs which call for it. The utility of resistive translation rests primarily on text-ideological considerations, not pragmatic ones. The use of the technique is situation dependent. It requires a translation situation which places social concerns (gender, class, ethnicity) and awareness of the other (opacity of the text) above other concerns (readability, acceptability, informativity). A major problem with resistive translation is that by denying fluency and, by extension, the textuality of the target, the resistive translator runs the risk of producing non-texts which can seem very much like bad translations. How do we tell the difference? One possible answer is that resistive translation produces "something that cannot be confused with either the source-language text or a text written originally in the target language." The translation contains a "use of language that resists easy reading according to contemporary standardsthat will make visible the intervention of the translator . . . " (Venuti 1986, 190). Venuti's idea of a discrete "use of language" implies that even resistive translation produces a systematic textual effect. It produces an ''unnatural," but usable, text for a trained and attentive reader.

We must understand what a text is before we can think about translating one. The way we translate must proceed from a consideration of the source text and the translation situation. Because there are many texts and many potential reasons to translate them, there are many ways to translate. This volume is called Translation as Text because translation does not pre-exist. Translation is not brought to the text and then applied to it. It is a textual process that starts with the source text and is managed by the translator to produce a target text. The translator manages translation as a textual process meant to induce one text from another. In most cases of technical and commercial translation, the text that is induced should be a fluent text in a target language.

In other cases, it may be an opaque resistive text, induced as a special response to a particular conjuncture of translation variables. Translation variables are primarily textual variables. The translator must learn to account for these variables in the process of translation. In the third chapter of this volume we turn to a detailed explanation of the textual variables that influence translation.

Thus, unnaturalness and necessity, loss and gain, destruction and harmony, integration and difference, are all properties of translation. They define its essential paradoxes. The study of translation should include an account of how these seemingly incompatible and divergent properties are mediated in the target text. Because translation is simultaneously a process and a result, there is a product whose success or failure can be evaluated. We can judge how the translator has responded to the demands of the translation situation. The translator always has choices to make. He or she has to cope with cultural difference and linguistic incompatibility. Translators have to master the difficulties of navigating messages to a foreign linguistic shore. The history of translation is full of examples of great triumph and shameful failure in this endeavor.

1. Neubert, Albrecht.; Shreve, Gregory M. Translation As Text Translation Studies, Kent State University Press, 1992 – 171p.

A term is a word or expression denoting a concept in a particular activity, job, or profession. Terms are frequently associated with professionalisms.

Terms can be single words: psychology, function, equity; or they may consist of several words: computer aided design system – система автоматического проектирования.

Terms are considered to have one meaning in one field. Therefore, they are context-free words, whose meaning does not depend on the context: cod – треска, herring – сельдь, squid – кальмар in any context.

Contrary to this belief, terms may have more than one meaning, since they can be understood differently in various schools and varies technologies: e.g., the grammatical term verb is considered to belong to morphology in the Russian school of linguistics, so it is translated as глагол. In the American school of linguistics it is often understood as a syntactical concept expressing a part of the sentence; therefore, in this case it corresponds to the Russian сказуемое. This gives rise to the problem of term unification. A translator must be very careful about terms expressing the same notion in different languages. One notion should be designated by a single term throughout the whole text.

Different fields of knowledge ascribe different meanings to one and the same term. For example, лист in the publishing field corresponds to the term sheet (author’s sheet); in biology, it is a leaf; in technique, it is a plate; in geology, it is lamina. Similarly, the term drive is equivalent to different Russian terms, since it has different meanings in various fields: привод (in mechanics), органы управления (in the automobile), сплав (in forestry), горизонтальная горная выработка (in mining), дисковод (in the computer), etc.

Term homonymy is sometimes due to the fact that words of general stock assume a technical meaning, thus becoming terms: for instance, memory – память, cell – ячейка памяти, driver – драйвер, управляющая программа (in computers). Also, terms of one field are borrowed by other fields, like variant and invariant were borrowed into linguistics from mathematics.

Such term homonymy challenges translation. A translator must know the exact meaning of term in this or that field, as well as its combinability, for the nearby attribute or another word may specify the term and affect its translation: антикоррозийное покрытие – corrosion-resistant coating, дерновое покрытие – sod-matting, дорожное покрытие – road pavement, покрытие крыши –roofing, маскировочное покрытие – camouflage cover, пенное покрытие – foam blanket.

To do accurate translation, it is necessary not only to know the meaning of the terms but also to link them with other words in speech. Erroneous word combination can cause difficulties in understanding the text. For example, the word combination прозвонить цепь cannot be rendered by its calque *to ring through the line. Its equivalent is to test the line. Therefore, translators always put high value on dictionaries containing word equivalents along with phrases and illustrating sentences.

Terms in dictionaries are usually arranged in alphabetical and keyword order. To find a word combination, it is necessary to look up a keyword, which is usually a noun. For example, to translate a compound term barking machine, it is necessary to look up the term machine. Its vocabulary entry will give the attributive group corresponding to корообдирочный станок, корообдирка.

Term translation may also depend on the regional character of the language. For example, антенна corresponds to aerial in British English, to antenna in American English; ветровое стекло (автомобиля) – windscreen (British English), windshield (American English); багажник (автомобиля) – boot (British), trunk (American).

Term form depends on the people using it. P. Newmark suggests three levels of term usage:

1) Academic. This includes transferred Latin and Greek words used in academic papers (phlegmasia alba dolens);

2) Professional. Formal terms used by experts (epidemic parotitis, scarlatina);

3) Popular. Layman vocabulary, which includes familiar alternative terms (mumps, scarlet fever).

In science, terms are neutral, non-expressive. Medical students feel no particular ways, whatever terms they use. But when a term is transferred to another register, it takes on a stylistic and emotional coloring. In common everyday situations, people feel abhorrence for pox, in Russian called дурная болезнь, and other things.

Term translation depends on the register it is used in. In science, translators tend to translate as precisely as possible. Absolute equivalence of terms is a requirement in scientific translation. In other registers, term translation depends on the receptors background, and on the function the term plays in the text.

§2. TRANSLATION TECHNIQUE

The main ways of translating terms are as follows:

1. Transcription (for loan terms): display – дисплей, algorythm – алгоритм, phenomenon - феномен. Care should be taken not to overuse this technique. Terms may not survive in the borrowed form, as happened with the computer term hardware whose loan equivalent хардвер is no longer used in computer science, but has given way to its explanatory substitution: электромеханическое оборудование, техническое обеспечение.

2. Transliteration: carbide – карбид, function – функция. Normally, terms are transliterated or transcribed when a target language lacks a certain notion and borrows it a short foreign form.

Many international loan terms are of Greek or Latin origin. This facilitates mutual understanding among specialists: arthrogryposis – артрогрипоз, osteodystrophy – остеодистрофия, hematoma – гематома.

However, when using this technique a translator should be aware of ‘false friends’, that is words similar in form but different in meaning, for example: benzene in chemistry is equal to бензол, not бензин, the latter corresponding to benzine, gasoline. Likewise, мутиляция = отторжение части тела или органа - rejection, mutilation – увечье, калечащее повреждение; hemeralopia – дневная слепота (ухудшение зрения при дневном свете), гемералопия = ночная (куриная) слепота – nyctalopia.

A translator of science texts must use only standard terms, avoiding slang or colloquial words. For instance, brown coal – бурый уголь (not *коричневый уголь); natural gas – природный газ (not *натуральный газ); airplane – самолет (not аэроплан); машинное масло – engine oil (not *machine oil).

3. Calque, half-calque: this technique is often applied to translating compound terms or term phrases: preanalysis – преданализ; structural system analysis – структурный системный анализ; address field – поле адреса; one-dimensional – одномерный.

This translation technique, even more than transcription or transliteration, may be detrimental to the correctness of the meaning, for it can lead to “false friends”: letter-of-credit is not письмо доверия but аккредитив; песочные часы – not *sand clock but hour-glass; цветные металлы – not *colored metals but non-ferrous metals. Transparent inner form of the word can cause no less trouble with translation equivalents: gooseberry – крыжовник (not гусиная ягода), quicksilver – ртуть (not быстрое серебро), bear’s onion – черемша (not медвежий лук).

4. Translating a word and using it as the term: mouse – мышь, net – сеть, memory – память. Gradually, specialists get accustomed to these terms and use them widely in speech.