COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF RENDERING ELEMENTS OF ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISIONS IN ENGLISH-UKRAINIAN TERMS

Abstract

The article deals with the translation of administrative divisions on the basis of American media discourse. When translating documents or other texts, the rendering of administrative divisions and proper names is of minor concern to the translators, in comparison to special terms or idiomatic expressions. However, consistency and standardization are what interpreters need and what they do not yet have, at least between the American English and Ukrainian. Various renderings of administrative divisions are discussed for two directions: a) from English (U.S. terms) into Ukrainian, and b) from Ukrainian into English. The paper seeks to address how to solve the problem of administrative units’ translation as a part of culture-specific items. The main objective of the article is to comprehensively investigate the ways of rendering the levels of administrative division in the USA and Ukraine, and current strategies applied by translators. In this context, the article examines the types of translation transformations, representation of transmitting of administrative divisions from English to Ukrainian, the best ways of the terms translation complying with the rules of Ukrainian language. Special attention is focused on national standardization of geographical names, namely on the conversion of endonyms: transliteration, transcription, translation and exonymization. Emphasis is placed on translation as a method of name conversion when the toponym includes a “translatable” generic term, meaning the source toponym, has semantic or lexical; on transliteration, the method of names conversion, which requires the replacement of each character in the source script by a corresponding character of the target script; on transcription, which is a phonetic approach to name conversion rather than a “letter-for-letter transformation” as in transliteration. The study highlights that administrative units are meaningful and able to convey hidden information, which in turn cannot be understood without profound cultural awareness, as well as this form of culture-specific items should be rendered into the target language by using both linguistic and cultural knowledge.