ETHNIC SLURS AS HATE SPEECH MARKERS AND PECULIARITIES OF THEIR TRANSLATION INTO UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE

Abstract

The article focuses on the study of “hate speech” phenomenon in present American English, and also presents certain approaches to their translation into Ukrainian. “Hate speech” is generally defined as speech designed to foster prejudice against a specific individual or group and to discriminate against another person because of race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, national or ethnic origin, etc. The article deals with discriminatory or insulting labels (ethnic slurs, labels, ethnopholisms) that are identified by the scholars as the markers of “hate speech”.The research shows extralingual causes of ethnic slurs’ emergence in languages: “we-they” dichotomy as the oldest opposition of human conscience, and stereotyping. These two factors form xenophobic tendencies and collective ethnic worldview where “aliens” are ascribed with negative qualities. It leads to the formation of negative labels (slurs) which have rather frequent usage in oral communication and written speech (fiction and media). The analysis of ethnic slurs’ formation was also undertaken. It showed that the most productive modelі are obtained by: a) affixation: cracker, limey; shortening: Jap (Japanese), Brit (British); blending: Cinxican (Chinese+Mexican), Mexicoon (Mexican + Black); borrowings: pinco, shmeisser; b) word-building: ”noun + noun” model (Christ killer, rug pilot); “adjective + noun” model (yellowbelly, kosher cutie); “adjective + noun + noun” model (salt water nigger, Red sea pedestrian); c) metaphor and metonymy: (peckerwood, banana, pie face, bagel-dog). The article also deals with methods of transferring ethnic slurs’ meaning from English into Ukrainian language. This process is rather complicated due to different reasons. Firstly, most of ethnic slurs are lacunary in our language because of the difference of ethnic composition of Ukraine and the USA. Secondly, these words are not always represented in the dictionaries, thus they require not only certain background knowledge but good intuition as well. All these factors prove the necessity of careful approach to choosing this or that translation strategy. We suggest that it should be the one used for translation of sub-standard vocabulary.