Unique items hypothesis: a case study of student Russian-to-English translations

Abstract

The subject of this article is the unique linguistic means of expressing the meaning given in the original in the interlanguage and translation perspectives. The object of the research is a contrastive study of original untranslated texts in the target language in order to identify unique linguistic elements, i.e. typical, idiomatic linguistic means of expressing the meaning given in the original in the target language. Special attention is paid to the corpus approach to the functional contrastive analysis of original untranslated texts. The authors consider the possibility of applying semasiological and onomasiological approaches to the contrastive analysis of parallel texts. The purpose of the article is to test the hypothesis of "unique elements" and the degree of their representation in the texts of translations made by graduate students. "Unique elements" means typical, idiomatic, regular linguistic means of expressing a certain meaning in the target language, which do not have structurally equivalent linguistic means in the source language. Research methods: functional contrastive analysis; corpus analysis; retrospective analysis of the source text and the translation text. The main conclusions of the study are the assumption that student translations do not present unique linguistic means in the translation language to express the meaning given in the original. These results were obtained through the use of contrastive functional analysis of parallel texts, i.e. original untranslated texts in the original language and the target language. A special contribution of the authors to the subject under study is that the latest methods of contrastive functional analysis and corpus methods are used for translation purposes. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that in Russian translation studies, for the first time, the hypothesis of unique linguistic elements and their non-representation in the translation text was considered as one of universals.