American culture-specific items designating status: Translation aspects

Abstract

The study deals with culture-specific items denoting the status of a person in the novel Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell and its translations into Ukrainian and Russian. The paper focuses around lexemes that functioned during and after the Civil War and nominated the inhabitants of the USA according to their background, political and religious views, social layer, occupation, ethnic or Afro-American identity. Structuring cultural knowledge is manifested in the cultural code, which is verbalised due to the use of the abovementioned groups of words denoting status in the novel under study. With the view to the specificity of the time described, the novel abounds in culture-specific items that cause difficulty in Ukrainian and Russian translations, thus presupposing the translator’s striving for either preservation of the historical epoch in the target text or its substitution with the features of contemporary life. The translation techniques applied are transcoding; borrowing from the English or other European languages; descriptive translation (explicitation); literal translation; neutralization; approximate translation; the use of translational doublets; contextual translation; omission. Research results contribute to the development of cultural translation which studies specific differences of source and target texts with the respect both to the source and target cultures.