Lexical-semantic transformation in translation

Descriptive translation

Descriptive translation is a complex transformation which is used to explain the meaning of SL units, often with the help of hierarchically different TL units. For example, a word may be translated as a word-combination or vice versa.           Descriptive translation may be used:

1) to render the meaning of equivalent-lacking units, for instance:

§ units of specific national lexicon:                                                                      Верховна Рада – The Ukrainian Parliament (Descriptive), Verkhovna Rada (Literal), Supreme Council (word-for-word), Supreme Rada (mixed)                                                вареники – a traditional Ukrainian dish, mea or fruit dumplings (Descriptive), varenyky (literal)

§ neologisms:                                                                                                                                     stepwife – the current wife of a women’s ex-husband or the ex-wife of a current husband (зведена дружина – теперішня дружина колишнього чоловіка або колишня дружина теперішнього чоловіка)

Delhi belly – a disordered/ upset stomach (розлад шлунку)

himbo – a man who is good-looking but unintelligent or superficial (хімбо – чоловік, привабливий ззовні, але інтелектуально нерозвинутий і досить поверховий)                       bimbo – a girl of the same qualities (бімбо – дівчина або молода жінка таких же якостей – приваблива, але поверхова)

gaydar – an intuitive sense that enables someone to identify whether another person is gay (гейдар – здатність (дар) розпізнавати нетрадиційну орієнтацію іншої людини (геїв)

2) to render the meaning of phraseological units or idioms:                                                              as mad as a hatter – навіжений

to have light fingers – бути нечистим на руку

to rain cats and dogs – лити як з ведра

burn not your house to rid it of the mouse – жертвувати великим, щоб уникнути малої неприємності (співвідносити засоби та ціль)

3) in footnotes to explain obscure places in narration

spiritual – спірічуел, релігійна пісня афроамериканців

Within the text the word “metrosexual” may be referred to as метросексуал or in a footnote explained – чоловік, який витрачає багато часу та грошей на свою зовнішність та спосіб життя

Syntax transformation

It is well known that languages differ in their grammatical structure. Apart from having different grammatical categories they differ in the use of those categories that seem to be similar. This naturally results in the necessity to introduce some grammatical changes in the translated version of any text. These changes depend on the character of correlation between the grammatical norms of SL and TL. Various as they are, all the possible changes may be classed under four main types: transpositions (перестановки), replacements (замены), additions (добавления), and omissions (опущения).

1. Transpositions. There may appear a necessity to rearrange elements of different levels: words, phrases, clauses or even sentences. Transposition of words and phrases may be caused by various reasons: differences in the accepted word order in SL and TL, presence or absence of emphasis, differences in the means of communicative syntax.

 Speaking of word order, it would be more accurate to say that to change word order really means to rearrange not so much words but parts of the sentence When translating from English into Russian one has to change word-order because normally it is fixed in English while in Russian it is relatively free: "George has bought some new things for this trip..." (Jerome K.Jerome) - "К этой поездке Джордж купил кое-какие новые вещи..." or "Джордж купил к этой поездке кое-какие новые вещи..." or "Джордж купил кое-какие новые вещи к этой поездке", which depends (in this particular case) on the rhythm of the whole utterance. But such freedom of choice is rather rare, since the word order of the Russian sentence is not as arbitrary as it seems to be. The position of a word in the sentence is often predetermined by its communicative function. In the English sentence "... I realized that a man was behind each one of the books" (R.Bradbury) the rhematic function of the noun "man" is indicated by the indefinite article. In order to make it the rheme of the Russian sentence it is necessary to put it in the final position: "... я понял, что за каждой из этих книг стоит человек". Another example: "A certain man. was seen to reel into Mr. Twain's hotel last night..." - "Вчера вечером видели, как в отель, где проживает мистер Марк Твен, ввалился некий человек..."                                                                                             Transposition of clauses is also used to preserve the semantic and communicative balance of the whole sentence: "The sun had got more powerful by the time we had finished breakfast…" (Jerome K. Jerome) - "К тому времени, как мы позавтракали, солнце припекало уже вовсю..." If the Russian sentence began with the principal clause ("Солнце припекало...") the logical meaning would be different - the sentence would state the time by which the sun got more powerful, while the real meaning of the sentence is to show what was the state of things by the time they finished their breakfast and had to decide upon further course of action.

Transposition of sentences does not become necessary very often. However, it helps sometimes to render the meaning which is expressed by the Past Perfect form in the English text, so as to indicate the succession of actions or events: "The village of St.Petersburg still mourned. The lost children had not been found" (Mark Twain) - "Пропавших детей так и не нашли. Городок Сант-Питерсберг оплакивал их".

2. Replacements. Replacements are also made at different levels.              A. To conform to the demands of the grammatical system of TL it may become necessary to change the grammatical form of a word: "fifteen thousand dollars" - "пятнадцать тысяч долларов" ("thousand" - singular, "тысяч" - plural), "And your hair's so lovely" - "У тебя такие красивые волосы ", etc.                                                                                             B. They often have to replace one part of speech by another. Most frequent replacements of this type are the following: a) English nouns with the suffix -er denoting the doer of an action are usually replaced by verbs in Russian: "I'm a moderate smoker " (J.D.Salinger) - "Я мало курю ", "When George is hanged Harris will be the worst packer in this world" (Jerome K.Jerome) - "Когда Джорджа повесят, хуже всех на свете укладывать вещи будет Гаррис". However, if such a noun denotes a person's profession the replacement is not recommended: when Holden Caulfield describes a girl, saying "She looked like a very good dancer" (J.D.Salinger), it should be translated "Похоже, она здорово танцует", but the sentence from S.Maugham's "Gigolo and Gigolette" "Stella was a good ballroom dancer", characterizing Stella's professional skill, should be translated "Стелла была хорошей исполнительницей бальных танцев". English deverbal nouns (usually converted from verbs) may be translated by verbs (especially if they are used in the construction "to give (to have, to make, to take) + N: "to give somebody a lift " - " подвезти кого-то". "He gave us all a look " (S.Maugham) - "Он взглянул на нас", etc. b) They often replace nouns by pronouns and vice versa. In the story "The Broken Boot" by J.Galsworthy Bryce-Green says to Caister: "Haven't seen you since you left the old camp ". "The old camp" is a phrase with an extremely wide and vague meaning, it means "some place we used to be at together and some people we were somehow connected with", so it is quite adequately translated "Не видел Вас с тех пор, как Вы ушли от нас ". The pronoun "нас" here is substituted for the noun "camp" (or, to be more exact, for the nominal phrase "the old camp"). A noun is substituted for a pronoun in the following example: "... and Harris sat on it, and it stuck to him., and they went looking for it all over the room" (Jerome K.Jerome). At first sight it seems possible to translate the sentence as it is: "... Гаррис сел на него, и оно к нему прилипло, и они принялись искать его. по всей комнате". However, the sentence is "overloaded" with pronouns, the more so because the Russian "его" can denote both Harris and the butter. That is why it is necessary to replace some pronouns by nouns to make the situation clear and the sentence more readable: "... а Гаррис сел на этот стул, и масло. прилипло к его брюкам., и они оба принялись искать его по всей комнате". 3. Additions. It is very difficult to say whether this transformation is lexical or grammatical: it is both. Its lexical aspects have already been discussed: it is necessary to make some explanations of transcribed words, describe those notions which have no names in TL, add the words which are implied but not expressed in the structure of attributive phrases, etc. However, in all these cases the structure of the sentence is involved, that is why the transformation is considered to be grammatical. Sometimes there appear grammatical reasons for adding new words: it happens when some meaning is expressed grammatically in the original text while there is no way of expressing it grammatically in TL. E.g. in English they use articles to differentiate between an author and his creation: "... the jewel of his collection - an Israels..." or "... Madame Lamotte, who was still in front of the Meissonier ”. (J.Galsworthy). In Russian it is necessary to add the word "картина": "... жемчужина его коллекции - картина Исраэлса..." and "... мадам Лямот, которая все еще стояла перед картиной Месонье ". Another example: the existence of the special possessive form (George's, Harris's) in English allows to use names in the absolute possessive construction: "Of course, I found George's and Harris's eighteen times over…" (Jerome K. Jerome). In Russian the corresponding grammatical form is that of the genitive case, the use of which would create an undesirable ambiguity: "... находил Джоржа и Гарриса". So it is necessary to add the word "щетка" implied in the English sentence: "Конечно же, щетки Джоржа и Гарриса попадались мне раз восемнадцать, если не больше...". In this way the translated version restores as it were the complete structure of the original sentence some elements of which might be only implied and not expressed materially. When using the transformation of addition one should be very careful to add only that which should really be added. It requires good knowledge of deep structure and surface structure grammars of both SL and TL and ability to analyze semantic and pragmatic aspects of a text.

4. Omissions. This transformation is seldom structurally obligatory, it is usually caused by stylistic considerations and deals with redundancy traditionally normative in SL and not accepted in TL. A typical example of such redundancy is the use of synonymic pairs in English: "..their only stay and support...." (Mark Twain) - both the words mean "поддержка", "опора". There is no need to translate them both, one is quite enough: "их единственная поддержка" or, according to the demands of the context, "единственное, что спасало их от голода" (translated in the same way as any one of these words would be translated).                                                                                 Sometimes it is recommended to omit semantically empty "tags" of declarative and interrogative sentences: "British to the backbone, that's what I am." (S.Maugham) - "Англичанин до мозга костей!" "I can't leave the room and send myself to you at the same time, can I.?" (G.B.Shaw) "Не могу же я уйти из комнаты и в то же время прислать самого себя к вам!" They sometimes recommend omitting logical redundancies and repetitions to achieve what is called "compression of the text". However, it must be remembered that logical redundancy of speech and various repetitions are used by writers to characterize the personage's individual manner of speaking, his way of thinking, etc. In such cases omissions are not allowed.

Principles of translation

Alexander Fraser Tytler (1747-1813), is the author of Essay on the Principles of Translation, which despite being originally published in 1791, is still relevant today. He sets down principles for translation and gives guidelines for quality assessment that are strikingly modern.                                                                                    Woodhouselee's three principles are as follows: 1. A translation should give a complete transcript of the ideas of the original work; 2. The style and manner of writing should be of the same character as that of the original; 3. A translation should have all the ease of original composition.                                                                         None of these would surprise a modern translator, yet they are nonetheless often touchy issues. So let's look at each a bit.                                                                                  The first principle seems obvious enough. It means no errors or omissions, but also includes the idea that a translation is not a copy or a reproduction, but an original work in and of itself, even if its content is based entirely on another's work. The translator is not supposed to make additions, amendments, or annotations, except possibly when working on esoteric literary texts. The translator should not play the game of rewriting an original text so that it says "what the author meant" or "what the author should have said."                                                                                                             The second principle is similarly obvious, though difficult to execute in practice. It means that the translator must not only have a complete command of writing in the target language (the translator's native language, in almost all cases), but also must be able to perceive stylistic touches and understand their meaning in the original text. A simple example from the realm of patent translation should suffice: "means" is the term of choice in a U.S. patent when explaining how the invention operates; by custom, it takes no article, which in any other document would be grammatically and stylistically peculiar, but in a patent is what we do. A patent translator working into English must know this, otherwise the character of the translation will be flawed.          The third principle is the hardest to achieve, because it harks back to the Russian axiom that states that if a translation is beautiful, it is not faithful, and if it is faithful, it is not beautiful. There is a delicate balance to achieve here, in other words, and translators must aspire to be good writers in their native language, and must know all the finer points of writing in the subject and language they are working in so as to produce a translation with "all the ease of original composition." In other words, a translation should not sound like a translation.

Morpheme

A "morpheme" is a short segment of language that meets three basic criteria:

1. It is a word or a part of a word that has meaning.

2. It cannot be divided into smaller meaningful segments without changing its meaning or leaving a meaningless remainder.

3. It has relatively the same stable meaning in different verbal environments.

Free and Bound Morphemes There are two types of morphemes-free morphemes and bound morphemes. "Free morphemes" can stand alone with a specific meaning, for example, eat, date, weak. "Bound morphemes" cannot stand alone with meaning. Morphemes are comprised of two separate classes called (a) bases (or roots) and (b) affixes.                                                                                                                                        A "base," or "root" is a morpheme in a word that gives the word its principle meaning. An example of a "free base" morpheme is woman in the word womanly. An example of a "bound base" morpheme is -sent in the word dissent.

Affixes

An "affix" is a bound morpheme that occurs before or after a base. An affix that comes before a base is called a "prefix." Some examples of prefixes are ante-, pre-, un-, and dis-, as in the following words:

Ante date       pre historic   un healthy     dis regard

An affix that comes after a base is called a "suffix." Some examples of suffixes are -ly, -er, -ism, and -ness, as in the following words:

Happ ily       garden er   capital ism kind ness

The criteria of compounds.

As English compounds consist of free forms, it is difficult to distinguish them from phrases

Composition — (30% of English words) — is a very productive word building means in modern English. The aim of this process is to combine two

stems to produce one word. e.x. bedroom; blackboard                                      Principles (problems) of composition                                                                             How to differentiate compound words from word combinations.                            5 criteria of this distinguish

1) Phonetic – all word-combination bare a primary stress on each of its constitutive parts where is compound word have only one primary stress. Ex. Laughing boys laughing gas (compound word)

But in speech stress may disappear. 2) Morphological – in compound words the ending is placed at the end of this structure. Ex. Weekend (s) 3) Syntactical – strict word order; Ex. Adj + noun = beautiful house But noun + adj. compound word Grass- green bottle 4) Syntactic – in some compound words the meaning of a whole can’t be deduced (исчислять) from the total sum of the meanings of its constitutive parts. Ex. Ladybird – божья коровка  Type – writer – печатная машинка

But – many compound words don’t bare idiomatic character.Ex. Bedroom, classroom, workday

 

 

Lexical-semantic transformation in translation

Lexical transformations change the semantic core of a translated word. They can be classified into the following groups: 1. Lexical substitution, or putting one word in place of another. It often results from the different semantic structures of the source language and target language words. Thus the word молодой is not always translated as young; rather, it depends on its word combinability: молодой картофель is equal to new potatoes. This translation equivalent is predetermined by the word combination it is used in. This type of translation can hardly be called substitution, since it is a regular equivalent for this phrase.

Deliberate substitution as a translation technique can be of several subtypes:

· Specification, or substituting words with a wider meaning with words of a narrower meaning: Will you do the room? – Ты уберешься в комнате? I’ll get the papers on the way home. – Я куплюгазеты по дороге домой. The underlined English words have larger scopes of meaning than their Russian counterparts and their particular semantics is recognized from the context.

· Generalization, or substituting words of a narrower meaning with those of a wider meaning: People don’t like to be stared at. – Людям не нравится, когда на них смотрят. If we compare the semantic structure of the English and Russian verbs, we can see that the English stare specifies the action of seeing expressed by the Russian verb. The Russian смотреть can imply staring, facing, eyeing, etc. The specific meaning in the Russian sentence can be expressed by the adverb пристально. Another reason for generalization in translating can be that the particular meaning expressed by the source language word might be irrelevant for the translation receptor: She bought the Oolong tea on her way home. – По дороге домой она купила китайского чаю. Oolong is a sort of Chinese tea but for the receptor this information is not important; therefore, the translator can generalize.

· Differentiation is a rather rare technique of substitution. It takes place when we substitute a word by another one with parallel meaning, denoting a similar species: bamboo curtain – железный занавес. Both bamboo and железо (iron) are materials known for their hard nature. They are used figuratively to denote the barriers between the Western and Communist countries (bamboo curtain in reference to China, железный занавес in reference to other Comecon (Council for Mutual Economic Aid) states. There are no hyponymic relations between the notions of bamboo and iron (though the referential area of железный занавес is of course much wider than that of bamboo curtain.) Modulation is a logical development of the notion expressed by the word: But outside it was raining. -– Но на улице шел дождь. The primary equivalent of the word outside is снаружи. But it is impossible to say in Russian * Но снаружи шел дождь. By means of unsophisticated logical operation the translator finds another equivalent: на улице. Thus he takes into consideration a tradition of the word combination and acceptability of collocation. He is aided in this by the metonymical closeness of word meanings based on contiguity of the two notions.                          2.Compensation is a deliberate introduction of some additional element in the target text to make up for the loss of a similar element in the source text. The main reason for this transformation is a vocabulary lacuna in the target language. For example, one of the Galsworthy’s characters was called a leopardess. But there is no one-word equivalent of the same stylistic coloring in Russian. Therefore, the translator compensated the word by using the word тигрица to characterize the lady.                                                3. Metaphoric transformations are based on transferring the meaning due to the similarity of notions. The target language can re-metaphorize a word or a phrase by using the same image (Don’t dirty your hands with that money! – Не марай рук этими деньгами!) or a different one (Он вернет нам деньги, когда рак свистнет. – He will pay us our money back when hell freezes over). The source language metaphor can be destroyed if there is no similar idiom in the target language: Весна уже на пороге. – Spring is coming very soon. Or, on the contrary, the target text is metaphorized either to compensate a stylistically marked word or phrase whose coloring was lost for some reason, or merely to express a source language lacuna: Он решил начать жить по-новому. – He decided to turn over a new life.

Descriptive translation

Descriptive translation is a complex transformation which is used to explain the meaning of SL units, often with the help of hierarchically different TL units. For example, a word may be translated as a word-combination or vice versa.           Descriptive translation may be used:

1) to render the meaning of equivalent-lacking units, for instance:

§ units of specific national lexicon:                                                                      Верховна Рада – The Ukrainian Parliament (Descriptive), Verkhovna Rada (Literal), Supreme Council (word-for-word), Supreme Rada (mixed)                                                вареники – a traditional Ukrainian dish, mea or fruit dumplings (Descriptive), varenyky (literal)

§ neologisms:                                                                                                                                     stepwife – the current wife of a women’s ex-husband or the ex-wife of a current husband (зведена дружина – теперішня дружина колишнього чоловіка або колишня дружина теперішнього чоловіка)

Delhi belly – a disordered/ upset stomach (розлад шлунку)

himbo – a man who is good-looking but unintelligent or superficial (хімбо – чоловік, привабливий ззовні, але інтелектуально нерозвинутий і досить поверховий)                       bimbo – a girl of the same qualities (бімбо – дівчина або молода жінка таких же якостей – приваблива, але поверхова)

gaydar – an intuitive sense that enables someone to identify whether another person is gay (гейдар – здатність (дар) розпізнавати нетрадиційну орієнтацію іншої людини (геїв)

2) to render the meaning of phraseological units or idioms:                                                              as mad as a hatter – навіжений

to have light fingers – бути нечистим на руку

to rain cats and dogs – лити як з ведра

burn not your house to rid it of the mouse – жертвувати великим, щоб уникнути малої неприємності (співвідносити засоби та ціль)

3) in footnotes to explain obscure places in narration

spiritual – спірічуел, релігійна пісня афроамериканців

Within the text the word “metrosexual” may be referred to as метросексуал or in a footnote explained – чоловік, який витрачає багато часу та грошей на свою зовнішність та спосіб життя

Syntax transformation

It is well known that languages differ in their grammatical structure. Apart from having different grammatical categories they differ in the use of those categories that seem to be similar. This naturally results in the necessity to introduce some grammatical changes in the translated version of any text. These changes depend on the character of correlation between the grammatical norms of SL and TL. Various as they are, all the possible changes may be classed under four main types: transpositions (перестановки), replacements (замены), additions (добавления), and omissions (опущения).

1. Transpositions. There may appear a necessity to rearrange elements of different levels: words, phrases, clauses or even sentences. Transposition of words and phrases may be caused by various reasons: differences in the accepted word order in SL and TL, presence or absence of emphasis, differences in the means of communicative syntax.

 Speaking of word order, it would be more accurate to say that to change word order really means to rearrange not so much words but parts of the sentence When translating from English into Russian one has to change word-order because normally it is fixed in English while in Russian it is relatively free: "George has bought some new things for this trip..." (Jerome K.Jerome) - "К этой поездке Джордж купил кое-какие новые вещи..." or "Джордж купил к этой поездке кое-какие новые вещи..." or "Джордж купил кое-какие новые вещи к этой поездке", which depends (in this particular case) on the rhythm of the whole utterance. But such freedom of choice is rather rare, since the word order of the Russian sentence is not as arbitrary as it seems to be. The position of a word in the sentence is often predetermined by its communicative function. In the English sentence "... I realized that a man was behind each one of the books" (R.Bradbury) the rhematic function of the noun "man" is indicated by the indefinite article. In order to make it the rheme of the Russian sentence it is necessary to put it in the final position: "... я понял, что за каждой из этих книг стоит человек". Another example: "A certain man. was seen to reel into Mr. Twain's hotel last night..." - "Вчера вечером видели, как в отель, где проживает мистер Марк Твен, ввалился некий человек..."                                                                                             Transposition of clauses is also used to preserve the semantic and communicative balance of the whole sentence: "The sun had got more powerful by the time we had finished breakfast…" (Jerome K. Jerome) - "К тому времени, как мы позавтракали, солнце припекало уже вовсю..." If the Russian sentence began with the principal clause ("Солнце припекало...") the logical meaning would be different - the sentence would state the time by which the sun got more powerful, while the real meaning of the sentence is to show what was the state of things by the time they finished their breakfast and had to decide upon further course of action.

Transposition of sentences does not become necessary very often. However, it helps sometimes to render the meaning which is expressed by the Past Perfect form in the English text, so as to indicate the succession of actions or events: "The village of St.Petersburg still mourned. The lost children had not been found" (Mark Twain) - "Пропавших детей так и не нашли. Городок Сант-Питерсберг оплакивал их".

2. Replacements. Replacements are also made at different levels.              A. To conform to the demands of the grammatical system of TL it may become necessary to change the grammatical form of a word: "fifteen thousand dollars" - "пятнадцать тысяч долларов" ("thousand" - singular, "тысяч" - plural), "And your hair's so lovely" - "У тебя такие красивые волосы ", etc.                                                                                             B. They often have to replace one part of speech by another. Most frequent replacements of this type are the following: a) English nouns with the suffix -er denoting the doer of an action are usually replaced by verbs in Russian: "I'm a moderate smoker " (J.D.Salinger) - "Я мало курю ", "When George is hanged Harris will be the worst packer in this world" (Jerome K.Jerome) - "Когда Джорджа повесят, хуже всех на свете укладывать вещи будет Гаррис". However, if such a noun denotes a person's profession the replacement is not recommended: when Holden Caulfield describes a girl, saying "She looked like a very good dancer" (J.D.Salinger), it should be translated "Похоже, она здорово танцует", but the sentence from S.Maugham's "Gigolo and Gigolette" "Stella was a good ballroom dancer", characterizing Stella's professional skill, should be translated "Стелла была хорошей исполнительницей бальных танцев". English deverbal nouns (usually converted from verbs) may be translated by verbs (especially if they are used in the construction "to give (to have, to make, to take) + N: "to give somebody a lift " - " подвезти кого-то". "He gave us all a look " (S.Maugham) - "Он взглянул на нас", etc. b) They often replace nouns by pronouns and vice versa. In the story "The Broken Boot" by J.Galsworthy Bryce-Green says to Caister: "Haven't seen you since you left the old camp ". "The old camp" is a phrase with an extremely wide and vague meaning, it means "some place we used to be at together and some people we were somehow connected with", so it is quite adequately translated "Не видел Вас с тех пор, как Вы ушли от нас ". The pronoun "нас" here is substituted for the noun "camp" (or, to be more exact, for the nominal phrase "the old camp"). A noun is substituted for a pronoun in the following example: "... and Harris sat on it, and it stuck to him., and they went looking for it all over the room" (Jerome K.Jerome). At first sight it seems possible to translate the sentence as it is: "... Гаррис сел на него, и оно к нему прилипло, и они принялись искать его. по всей комнате". However, the sentence is "overloaded" with pronouns, the more so because the Russian "его" can denote both Harris and the butter. That is why it is necessary to replace some pronouns by nouns to make the situation clear and the sentence more readable: "... а Гаррис сел на этот стул, и масло. прилипло к его брюкам., и они оба принялись искать его по всей комнате". 3. Additions. It is very difficult to say whether this transformation is lexical or grammatical: it is both. Its lexical aspects have already been discussed: it is necessary to make some explanations of transcribed words, describe those notions which have no names in TL, add the words which are implied but not expressed in the structure of attributive phrases, etc. However, in all these cases the structure of the sentence is involved, that is why the transformation is considered to be grammatical. Sometimes there appear grammatical reasons for adding new words: it happens when some meaning is expressed grammatically in the original text while there is no way of expressing it grammatically in TL. E.g. in English they use articles to differentiate between an author and his creation: "... the jewel of his collection - an Israels..." or "... Madame Lamotte, who was still in front of the Meissonier ”. (J.Galsworthy). In Russian it is necessary to add the word "картина": "... жемчужина его коллекции - картина Исраэлса..." and "... мадам Лямот, которая все еще стояла перед картиной Месонье ". Another example: the existence of the special possessive form (George's, Harris's) in English allows to use names in the absolute possessive construction: "Of course, I found George's and Harris's eighteen times over…" (Jerome K. Jerome). In Russian the corresponding grammatical form is that of the genitive case, the use of which would create an undesirable ambiguity: "... находил Джоржа и Гарриса". So it is necessary to add the word "щетка" implied in the English sentence: "Конечно же, щетки Джоржа и Гарриса попадались мне раз восемнадцать, если не больше...". In this way the translated version restores as it were the complete structure of the original sentence some elements of which might be only implied and not expressed materially. When using the transformation of addition one should be very careful to add only that which should really be added. It requires good knowledge of deep structure and surface structure grammars of both SL and TL and ability to analyze semantic and pragmatic aspects of a text.

4. Omissions. This transformation is seldom structurally obligatory, it is usually caused by stylistic considerations and deals with redundancy traditionally normative in SL and not accepted in TL. A typical example of such redundancy is the use of synonymic pairs in English: "..their only stay and support...." (Mark Twain) - both the words mean "поддержка", "опора". There is no need to translate them both, one is quite enough: "их единственная поддержка" or, according to the demands of the context, "единственное, что спасало их от голода" (translated in the same way as any one of these words would be translated).                                                                                 Sometimes it is recommended to omit semantically empty "tags" of declarative and interrogative sentences: "British to the backbone, that's what I am." (S.Maugham) - "Англичанин до мозга костей!" "I can't leave the room and send myself to you at the same time, can I.?" (G.B.Shaw) "Не могу же я уйти из комнаты и в то же время прислать самого себя к вам!" They sometimes recommend omitting logical redundancies and repetitions to achieve what is called "compression of the text". However, it must be remembered that logical redundancy of speech and various repetitions are used by writers to characterize the personage's individual manner of speaking, his way of thinking, etc. In such cases omissions are not allowed.

Principles of translation

Alexander Fraser Tytler (1747-1813), is the author of Essay on the Principles of Translation, which despite being originally published in 1791, is still relevant today. He sets down principles for translation and gives guidelines for quality assessment that are strikingly modern.                                                                                    Woodhouselee's three principles are as follows: 1. A translation should give a complete transcript of the ideas of the original work; 2. The style and manner of writing should be of the same character as that of the original; 3. A translation should have all the ease of original composition.                                                                         None of these would surprise a modern translator, yet they are nonetheless often touchy issues. So let's look at each a bit.                                                                                  The first principle seems obvious enough. It means no errors or omissions, but also includes the idea that a translation is not a copy or a reproduction, but an original work in and of itself, even if its content is based entirely on another's work. The translator is not supposed to make additions, amendments, or annotations, except possibly when working on esoteric literary texts. The translator should not play the game of rewriting an original text so that it says "what the author meant" or "what the author should have said."                                                                                                             The second principle is similarly obvious, though difficult to execute in practice. It means that the translator must not only have a complete command of writing in the target language (the translator's native language, in almost all cases), but also must be able to perceive stylistic touches and understand their meaning in the original text. A simple example from the realm of patent translation should suffice: "means" is the term of choice in a U.S. patent when explaining how the invention operates; by custom, it takes no article, which in any other document would be grammatically and stylistically peculiar, but in a patent is what we do. A patent translator working into English must know this, otherwise the character of the translation will be flawed.          The third principle is the hardest to achieve, because it harks back to the Russian axiom that states that if a translation is beautiful, it is not faithful, and if it is faithful, it is not beautiful. There is a delicate balance to achieve here, in other words, and translators must aspire to be good writers in their native language, and must know all the finer points of writing in the subject and language they are working in so as to produce a translation with "all the ease of original composition." In other words, a translation should not sound like a translation.