Features of representing the subjunctive mood in natural languages (on the example of the translation of short stories by S. Zweig)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the representation of the subjunctive mood in the literary texts of natural languages (German and Russian). The subject of the study is the sentences with a subjunctive mood in German and Russian. The relevance of the study is due to difficulties in translating sentences with a subjunctive inclination from German to Russian. These difficulties are associated with a large formal discrepancy between the Russian subjunctive mood and the German, as well as the richness of the values of temporal forms in the German language. Research in this area will make it possible to achieve a more holistic view of the subjunctive mood in natural language (German and Russian) in translation and grammatical aspects. On the basis of the linguistic analysis, the authors explain how the artistic sublanguage texts represent the subjunctive mood and consider linguistic translation strategies in the Russian-language texts. The article contains examples from the artistic text in German and their translations into Russian, being accompanied by comments and conclusions, presented in the corresponding diagrams. The material of the study was the original novels of Austrian writer S. Zweig in German and their official translations into Russian. The results of the analysis can serve as a contribution to the theory and methodology of teaching the translation, to the practice of teaching the translation of German texts into Russian, and also in the process of studying the features of S. Zweig’s language and style and compiling machine translation programs for literary texts.