The choice of an essay as the object of analysis presents significant difficulties
for the researcher, since even the definition of the genre in the theory of literature
is still not set; there is no integral concept of the genre, the views of literary scholars on essays are extremely contradictory.
Unlike existing theoretical and practical studies on various literary genres,
the essay seems to be an insufficiently studied object of analysis in the linguistic
and translation perspectives, which determines the relevance of the paper.
The objective of the study is to determine the features of the translation of a
publicist essay on the example of the translation of the literary work of I. Brodsky
“Reflection on a Spawn of Hell” from Russian into English. To achieve this objective, the following tasks are to be solved:
1) to identify the main stylistic features of the essay by I. Brodsky;
2) to determine the specifics of its translation into English.
The dominant function of the essay is the influencing one. It is implemented
by referring to the emotional-figurative way of the addressee’s perception of the
world. The stylistic features of I. Brodsky’s publicist essay, characterizing it as a
resource of stylistic expressiveness, fully agree with the influencing function of the
type of the text under study: syntactic constructions with inverted word order, rhetorical questions, quotations, complex sentences with a number of homogeneous
members, elliptical constructions, gradation, stylistically coloured vocabulary, a
combination of stylistically reduced and colloquial vocabulary aimed at achieving maximum expressiveness.
The translator renders the stylistic features of the source text by selecting
functional analogues in the target language. Difficulties arise when reproducing
the cultural realities of the original linguistic culture.
The appellative type of the text, which an essay is, requires significant linguocultural adaptation of the realities of the source language to the socio-cultural
background of the target language. The translation under study tends to reproduce only the outer shell of definite lexemes and phrases, which are bearers of
factual information and have a significant pragmatic potential in the original text.
Despite the complexity and cultural richness of the text itself, with its specific
words and conceptual system, the translator does not fully pragmatically adapt
the significant elements of the source text, which affects the adequacy of its translation. In our opinion, translation errors prevent reproduction of the author’s
communicative intentions in full.
We consider the prospects for further developments in the expansion of research materials in order to obtain general conclusions regarding the peculiarities
of the translation of an essay as a genre and the specifics of rendering the individual author’s style in translation.
Punctuation Relevance in Subtitle: The Foreign Audience Example
