Some Difficulties of Translating English Phrasal Verbs into Russian
Tulku m?c?bu centrs
Diploma paper: Some Difficulties of Translating English Phrasal Verbs into
Russian
ХХХХХХХХХХ ХХХХХ
The 3rd year of education
Personal code: 211178-10916
Riga
2001
ANNOTATION
Diploma paper is devoted to a very current theme about the
translating of English phrasal verbs to Russian. Translating of
English phrasal verbs is very important part of the science of
translation because it couldn’t be a real good correct translation
without correct translating of the phrasal verbs.
The paper consists of four parts which touch upon questions of
the history of translation in Russia and its development, some
points of tranlsating theory, the consideration of some ways of the
translation of English phrasal verbs, and the practical translation
and its comments.
Introduction
Translation is a very ancient kind of human activity. As soon as
groups of people with different languages were born in human history,
bilinguals appeared and they helped to communicate between collectives of
different languages. With the development of the written language, written
translators join oral ones. They translated different texts of official,
religious and business character. Translation had the main social function
at first. It made possible inter-linguistic communication of people. The
spreading of the written translation opened to people the wide access to
cultural achievements of other nations; it made possible interaction and
inter-enrichment of literature and culture. The knowledge of foreign
languages let to read original books, but not everybody can earn at least
one foreign language.
My work is devoted to the basic points of theory of translation and
the difficulties of translation of English phrasal verbs to Russian.
Russian is a part of the East Slavonic family of languages and one
of the six official languages of the United Nations. Russian tradition of
translation has a long history. Writing, literature and translations were
introduced in Kievan Rus in a relatively mature form. The Greek priest
Cyril and his brother Methodius who created new alphabet (now known as
Cyrillic) were the first translators. Among their first translations from
Greek were the New Testament, the Psalter and the Prayer Book. After Rus
embraced Christianity in 988, numerous translations were made to give the
converts access to the philosophical and ethical doctrines of the new
religion and to the church’s rituals and customs. In the 17th century, a
great number of translations of predominantly nonreligious material began
to appear. Scholarly translations included topics in astronomy and
astrology, arithmetic and geometry, anatomy and medicine, as well as
description of various animals. The 18th century proved decisive in the
development of translation in Russia. Peter the Great’s political reforms
greatly expanded Russia’s economic and cultural contacts with European
countries, and this created a demand for numerous translations of
scientific and technical texts, as well as works of fiction. The 19th
century can be described as the golden age of Russian translation. If the
previous age hade made translation a professional activity, the nineteenth
century raised this activity to the level of high art. The main figures of
translation of this period are Nikolai Karamzin and Vasily Zhukovsky.
Alezander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, the two great Russian poets, also
played a major role in the history of translation in Russia. Although
translations occupied a relatively modest place in their poetry, they made
a significant contribution to the improvement of literary translation in
Russia. The years following the 1917 Revolution saw a new upsurge in
translation activity. The fact that the Soviet Union was a multinational
state contributed to the growing demand fro translation. The scale of
translation among national literatures was particularly impressive. The
years of perestroika radically changed the nature of translation practice
in general and the market for translations in particular. The abolition of
censorship has made it possible to translate many books, which had been
regarded as inadmissible on ideological or moral grounds. There has been a
greater demand of English translators and interpreters, and many of them
earn good money working for national or foreign firms, or joint ventures.
English language comes to all spheres of life and translation from English
to Russian and back is very important part of successful business and its
development.
Translation is the transformation of the message of the source
language to the message of the translating language. The exact translation
is impossible because of a great number of languages differences in the
grammar and the number of words, besides, the distinction of the cultures
can influence the way of translating and its results. Translation is the
art of revelation. It makes the unknown known. The translator has the fever
and craft to recognize, recreate and reveal the works of the other artist.
Translation is an art between tongues.
Some translators tried to define the row of demands of which the
good translators should be. The French humanist E. Dolet (1509 – 1546)
considered that a translator should keep the following five basic
principles of translation:
1. Ti understand the content of the translating text and the
intention of the author perfectly;
2. To know the language he translates from and the language he
translates on perfectly;
3. To avoid the tendency to translate word for word, because it
misrepresents the original content and spoils the beauty of its
form;
4. To use the translation the speech forms in general use;
5. To reproduce the general impression in corresponding key,
produced by the original, by choosing and placing words
correctly.
In 1790 the Englishman A. Tayler formed the following requests to
the translation in his book “The principles of the translation”:
1. The translation should transfer the ideas of the original
completely;
2. The style and way of the exposition should be the same as in the
original;
3. The translation should be read with the same easiness as the
original works.
The translation is the multifaceted phenomenon and some aspects of
it can be the subjects of the research of different sciences. In the frames
of the science of translation psychological, literature critical,
ethnographical and other points of translation as well as the history of
translation in one or other country are being studied. According to the
subject of research we use the knowledge of the psychology of translation,
the theory of art and literary translation, ethnographical science of
translation, historical science of translation and so on. The main place in
the modern translation belongs to linguistic translation, which studies the
translation as linguistic phenomenon. The different kinds of translation
complement each other and strive to detailed description of the activity of
the translation.
The theory of translation puts forward the following tasks:
1. To open and describe the common linguistic basis of translation,
that is to show which peculiarities of linguistic systems and
regularities of the language operation are the basis of the
translating process, make this process possible and determine its
character and borders;
2. To determine the translation as the subject of the linguistic
research, to show its difference from the other kinds of
linguistic mediation;
3. To work out the basis of classification of kinds of the
translating activity;
4. To open the essence of the translating equivalence as the basis
of the communicative identity of the original texts and the
translation;
5. To work out the common principles and the peculiarities of
construction of the peculiar and special translation theories for
the different combinations of languages;
6. To work out the common principles of the scientific description
of the translation process as actions of a translator of
transforming the original text to the translating text;
7. To open the influence on the translating process of pragmatic and
social linguistic factors;
8. To determine the idea “the translating norm” and to work out the
principles.
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
