Double-Sided Transformations of Culture-Bound Constituents in William Saroyan’s Cross-Cultural Domain

The article focuses on the transformations, which occur in Russian and Armenian translations of culture-bound constituents in W. Saroyan’s fiction with special reference to the analysis of their pragmatic value and both cross-cultural and cross-language identification. The aim of the analysis is to reveal the so-called Saroyanesque identity and the translation perspectives of his specific manner of reproducing the actual reality, his personal vision of the world he lived in and created in, the world which combined the environment, circumstances, conditions, characters, cultures, ethnicity of two different communities – his native Armenian and no less native America. The so-called double-sided transformations of culture-bound constituents occur in W. Saroyan’s fiction at basically two levels: the cognitive level of ethnic and mental indicators transformations and the linguistic level of culture-bound elements translation (words, phrases, exclamations etc.). To keep Saroyanesque identity the translators should primarily transform the ideas, the concepts, the ethnic mentality of the characters, then the language media should undergo certain pragmatic modification to be correctly interpreted by the target audience.

The Spectacle of Appearances

Ovid thematizes the gap between appearance and reality, which also is represented on the linguistic level through an insistent, systematic discordance between the literal meaning of the language and the figurative one. The metamorphic and spectacular nature of language therefore becomes a mirror of the whole reality, which is subject to the law of continuous change, and gives rise to the game of illusions and deceptions in which humans are involved and often overwhelmed. Ovid’s verbal pyrotechnics, long dismissed as a fatuous rhetorical exercise, is actually a highly conscious key to representing reality with its paradoxes; and the distinctive visual, ekphrastic style of his poem (destined to become the ‘Bible of painters’) is the mark of Ovid’s continuous intense reflection on his own representational strategies.

ROUTINE VS. ROUTINIZATION IN A. BIERCE’S STORY «AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE»

The article introduces a phenomenological approach to the analysis of A. Bierce’s story «An occurrence at Owl creek bridge». The category of routine is studied within the frames of Husserl’s interpretation of transcendental inter-subjectivity according to which «realized experience» is presented on two levels. The first is connected with a single flood of consciousness, and, to be more precise,with a possible perception of a single ego-subject. In the story it is Peyton Farquhar. The second represents the constructed unity of a higher level and is a multitude of subjects which are in a state of agreement and mutual understanding. These are soldiers and officers of the Unionist Army, who are involved into the procedure of a hanging which acquires the status of a ritualized routine, daily occurrence. Bierce’s approach to routinization of death is explicitly ironic. Irony is applied on both stylistic and linguistic levels. On linguistic level it is used as traditional incompatibility between what is said and what is meant. On stylistic one– it accentuates the contrast between textual reality and its possible perception by reading audience. This contrast is also revealed through the opposition of two temporal layers – physical and psychological. The first has system forming narrative function, and the latter – system differentiating one. These two levels have a cross-section – internal existential perception of time and space by the person condemned to the execution and his temporal victory over death. At the same time the narrative mechanism of probing deep into the main character’s state of mind is being analysed. This mechanism helps the writer to express implicitly his real attitude to this «occurrence», which reflected paradoxality of civil conflict. On the one hand, it is an attempt to routinize the execution of enemies, on the other, – futile desire to return to the routine.

Philological analysis of the text: reception of I. A. Bunin's short fiction “The Epitaph”

The object of this research is Ivan Bunin’s prose of the early period – “The Epitaph”. I. A. Bunin is a Neorealist writer of the turn of the XIX – XX centuries, publicist, a unique representative of the white émigré. The subject of this research is the reception of “The Epitaph” by modern audience based on the command of philological text analysis. Having analyzed the traditional semantic components of the literary text (that are part of the concept of “philological text analysis”), the authors offer modern approaches towards representation of the established semantic categories of the text, demonstrate their functionality on the linguistic level, analyze the methods of their lexical representation and verbalization, which determines the novelty of this article. The goal lies in philological analysis of I. A. Bunin's short fiction “The Epitaph”, taking into account the historical-cultural context of its creation, the role of extralinguistic factors in the text, and their reflection on the linguistic level, semantics of the title and keywords in the ideological-thematic content of the work and expression of the authorial position. Alongside the traditional methods of academic philology, such as historical-cultural, biographical, commentary reading, linguistic-stylistic analysis, the research employs the techniques of cognitive linguistics. This article is first to describe the experience of a commentary reading of I. A. Bunin's short fiction “The Epitaph”, which is based on cognition of the semantic components of the work through the prism of a linguostylistic approach within the framework of philological analysis. The authors reveal techniques of reading the text, placing emphasis on the lexical means of representation of the key semantic categories, which on the one hand reflect the writer’s worldview , while on the other – form his individual writing style. Such articulation of the problem determines the prospects for the study of other proses of I. A. Bunin.

Ukrainian Translation and Linguistic Validation of the Gender Bias Quiz Questionnaire

This work aims to confirm the Ukrainian variant of the Gender Bias Quiz at a linguistic level. Thе questionnaire consists of 20 questions, which allows the psychologist to determine the individual's gender bias. Respondents (university students, 20-26 years old) completed the Ukrainian translated version of the Gender Bias Quiz questionnaire, and then two weeks later, students completed the original one. Statistical analysis of the data included the use of the Wilcoxon test and the Spearman correlation test. The Wilcoxon test results showed no significant differences between the original (English) and the translated questionnaire. Instead, the Spearman test showed a positive correlation at a high level of statistical significance between respondents' scores in the first and second tests. The obtained data proved the successful linguistic validation of this questionnaire.

Prolexbase: une ontologie pour le traitement multilingue des noms propres

Proper names often constitute a problem in translation. This contribution deals with an ontology which represents the basis for a multilingual database of proper names, Prolexbase. It is being set up for treatment of proper names in the framework of the Prolex project, a research programme supported by the French Ministry of Industry in collaboration with two firms working on the market of language technologies: Systran and Exalead. The aim of this collaboration is to create a multilingual database of proper names containing information applicable to machine translation, computer aided translation, data research as well as spelling dictionaries. These particular aims guided the creation of the ontology whose description will follow. Beside a set of language-dependent and language-independent relations associated with a logical model, the data- base is founded on a four level ontology: the level of instances (the proper names such as they appear in a written text in a specific language), the linguistic level (the level of so called “prolexemes”), the conceptual level (the numerical pivots) as well as the metaconceptual level (types and supertypes). We will describe here the different levels of the ontology and their implementation in the database using French and German examples.

HANDLING MULTI-LEVEL CLASSES IN THE CITY OF BATUMI

If we take into account the common teacher-centered or the one-book-fits-all approach, where the teacher is forced to focus on the middle level, many students at the top or bottom end of the language scale are left dissatisfied or demotivated. Once students are placed into a certain class they are regarded as being at much the same linguistic level in their foreign language, and a one-book-fits-all approach is often adopted in the classroom, where all students are required to work at the same pace and complete the tasks of the same difficulty. There are various scholarly approaches to the problem. This study aims to determine whether teachers are aware of possible techniques like differentiated work, dividing a class, letting students choose the task, other techniques, and what the frequency of their use is. The survey was carried out among the teachers working at both higher education institutions and secondary schools to find out how often teachers refer to different techniques. The results suggest that differentiated work requires much and thorough preparation on the part of a teacher, which becomes quite time-consuming at times. Therefore, teachers try to deal with mixed-level classes using mostly class division into groups or pairs. Moreover, teachers sometimes or almost rarely let their students choose what to do. A few teachers apply other techniques in their mixed-level classes. This discussion results in the following outcome – there is still the need to raise teachers’ awareness of the techniques to deal with students of different needs in class.

EXPRESS: Representations underling pronoun choice in Italian and English

Research has shown that speakers use fewer pronouns when the referential candidates are more similar and hence compete more strongly. Here we examined the locus of such an effect, investigating whether pronoun use is affected by the referents’ competition at a non-linguistic level only (non-linguistic competition account) or whether it is also affected by competition arising from the antecedents’ similarities (linguistic competition account) and the extent to which this depends on the type of pronoun. Speakers used Italian null pronouns and English pronouns less often (relative to full nouns) when the referential candidates compete more strongly situationally, whilst the antecedents’ semantic, grammatical or phonological similarity did not affect the rates of either pronouns, providing support for the non-linguistic competition account. However, unlike English pronouns, Italian null pronouns were unaffected by gender congruence between human referents, running counter to the gender effect for the use of non-gendered overt pronouns reported earlier. Hence, whilst both null and overt pronouns are sensitive to non-linguistic competition, what similarity affects non-linguistic competition partly depends on the type of pronouns.

Totality of Means of Interaction with the Reader in the Footnotes of A.D. Cantemir to the Russian Translation of Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds

The article deals with functional totality of means of interaction with the reader in the footnotes by A.D. Cantemir to his Russian translation of Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds. The content, the language and the genre of the footnotes prove them to be addressed to the Russian reader. On the linguistic level, it is expressed by actualization of modus categories and metatextual means that do not only point at the addresser indirectly, but also highlight the reader’s figure in the footnotes’ text. Actualization of modus categories allows Cantemir to bring him closer to the reader in the same textual space and time, whereas metatextual units control the reader’s attention by structuring information. Interaction of these linguistic means within the text of footnotes provides interaction between Cantemir and the Russian reader: their common space and time increase the persuasive effect of explanations and examples introduced by metatextual means.

Travesty as a cycle-forming technique of B. Akunin's “Fandorin Series”

The subject of this research is a set of cycle-forming techniques used by Boris Akunin in creating “Fandorin Series” dedicated to the detective Erast Fandorin. One of such techniques is travesty, “gender transitioning” that manifests on the imagery and linguistic levels. A range of characters in the novels and stories about Fandorin disguise themselves as the representatives of the other gender; this is common to the serial criminals who have committed multiple offenses. On the linguistic level, travesty manifests in a way that some characters, having a good command of Russian language, deliberately confuse masculine and feminine genders in their speech or writing. At the same time, travesty is always accompanied by the typical detective motif: the criminal character is initially introduced to the text and conceals his true self, so the detective has foster efforts to track him down. The novelty of this study consists in determination of the two basic strategies of travesty used by B. Akunin in “Fandorin Series”, and as well as in following their realization in various novels and stories dedicated to Erast Fandorin. On both imagery and semantic levels, travesty is more characteristic to the “sealed” type of detective, when the suspect is among a limited scope of persons and gradually reveals his true nature. At the same time, the implementation of such strategy in some texts is consistent (the hero constantly changes his appearance / grammatical gender), while in other texts manifests sporadically.