TRANSLATION OF CULTURE-SPECIFIC ITEMS IN A LITERARY TEXT (BASED ON A. CONAN-DOYLE’S NOVEL “THE LOST WORLD”)

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to consider the special aspects of the translation of culture-specific items in a literary text as well as to study the most common techniques of their translation in A. Conan Doyle’s novel “The Lost World”. As a result of the research, it was found that culture-specific items convey a special national flavor and translators should pay special attention to them in literary texts. For translators, the literary style is one of the most difficult because during the translation of literary texts it is very important to correctly convey the content of the text, colorfulness, images and characters’ character. A translated novel or short story is an independent work since the translator contributes something of his/her own. Moreover, the translator faces such a problem as dialogues and lines. It is quite difficult to translate a foreign language into Ukrainian in such a way that a Ukrainian-speaking person understands the national peculiarities of another nation. Therefore, there are often omissions in the translation process since there are simply no suitable equivalents for the transmission of cues. Analyzing the culture-specific items of A. Conan Doyle’s novel “The Lost World” translated into Ukrainian, the following translation methods were found: transcription, transliteration, calque, transformational translation and translation using a functional analogue. At the same time, we believe that the translation using a functional analogue has a significant drawback - there is a replacement of the culture-specific item, which can lead to a distortion of the meaning of the text, which is a big disadvantage in the translator’s work. The question of the transfer of foreign language culturespecific items that they are understandable to the speakers of the target language still remains open due to the multitude of translation methods and the variety of lexical units. It is also worth noting that the translation process is not devoid of a creative component, so different translators can see the translation version of the same culture-specific item in different ways. The task of the translator is to extract the information contained in the original text as completely as possible in order to possess the background knowledge that native speakers have. To summarize, we can say that adequate translation of culture-specific items is a difficult and responsible job as far as it depends on how the reader perceives the work and understands its plot.