THE PECULIARITIES OF ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF SEMANTIC AND PRAGMATIC FUNCTIONAL CONTENT OF DIMINUTIVES IN TARAS SHEVCHENKO’S POETRY

Abstract

The presence of large number of diminutives in T. Shevchenko’s works is explained first of all by the folklore-poetic and folk-colloquial bases of his poetical language. Diminutives in T. Shevchenko’s poetic works realize different functions: semantic, pragmatic, stylistic, symbolizing etc. The main semantic functions are: the expression of positive or negative evaluative-emotional meaning, much less often – the expression of objective smallness. Among the pragmatic functions of diminutives, the most common are: to create the intimacy of speech, which gives the poetry the form of open conversation with the reader, to express author’s own attitude to various life situations, to evoke the reader’s corresponding feelings and emotions. Diminutives are often used for the purposes of folklore stylization of speech, for outlining the gender stylistic characteristics of poetry. Among the diminutives analyzed in the data work there are a lot of symbols-concepts of Ukrainian linguoculture. Thus, the translation of the semantic-pragmatic content of the diminutives in T. Shevchenko’s poems poses a range of tasks for translators. The analysis of English translations of T. Shevchenko’s poems by different translators showed that a significant number of diminutives have not been translated. This can be explained not only by the analytical structure of the English language, but also by such extralinguistic factors as the tendency of British linguoculture for emotional restraint and its peculiarities of psychobehavioral norms that do not approve of open expression of either positive or negative emotions. To refer the semantic-pragmatic content of diminutives, translators used such means as transliteration, connotative transposition, forms with diminutive suffixes, as well as situational equivalents represented by adjective-noun constructions. Most of the diminutives analyzed in the paper are leading concepts in Ukrainian linguoculture, presenting a complex semantic matrix, which, as the analysis showed, turned out to be extremely difficult to transmit when translating poems.