FRENCH BARBARISMS IN MODERN BRITISH PROSE: THE PECULIARITIES OF TRANSLATION INTO THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE (CASE STUDY: WORKS BY J. BARNES)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the translation of barbarisms. It is based on the analysis of some Julian Barnes’s stories interpretation into Russian. The object of the research is the process of translating realia of modern British prose from English into Russian, the subject is the transformations used in the this process of translation. The objective is to identify the realia in the stories by J. Barnes and to consider the ways of their translation into Russian. The study is based on the classification of realia by S. Vlahov and S. Florin, which divides realia in geographical, ethnographical, political and social (the latter two being united in one group). The research revealed that the most numerous French realia in J. Barnes’ short stories are ethnographical, political and social. Geographical realia are less frequent and they are not a challenge for a translator because usually transcoding and traditional transcription are applied. Both ethnographical and political and social realia were most often reproduced in the target text by preserving the barbarism used in the source text. This was caused by striving to keep the national colouring and the function of the realia to locate the events of a text. Every time when a barbarism was preserved, its translation into Russian was offered in the notes at the end of the book. The authors of the article consider this to be not a very appropriate solution for such translation problems because a future reader of the target text has to interrupt the process of reading and to address a different page of the book to find out the meaning of a barbarism, which may distort the images created in the book and even make a reader irritated and, consequently, he/she will put the book away. The perspective of the research is to examine the peculiarities of functioning of realia belonging to non-English-speaking nations in modern English texts and the ways of their translation into Ukrainian and Russian.