Language Transformations in the Process of Translation of English Prose Into Ukrainian (On the Basis of the Colm Toibin’s Novel ‘House of Names’)

Abstract

The article deals with the peculiarities of transformations in the process of translation of English prose into Ukrainian. Despite the large number of works covering this issue, the problem of translating prose texts is not dismissed. There is a need to systematize and study the types of lexical and grammatical transformations, used in translating literary texts, in practice. To observe the process of formation of inter-language transformations, the novel by an Irish writer Colm Toibin ‘House of Names’ has been chosen. The various scientists’ approaches to establishing the transformation types are analyzed. It is revealed that due to differences in the syntactic, grammatical and morphological structures of the English and Ukrainian languages, lexical and grammatical transformations are widely used in translation. Lexical transformations are the deviations from direct vocabulary matches. The lexical transformations are mainly caused by the fact that the volume of the lexical units of the original language and the language of translation do not coincide. Among lexical transformations, the most common are generalization, concretization, compensation, lexical additions. Grammatical transformations are to transform the structure of a sentence in the translation process according to the rules of the source language. The transformation can be complete or partial depending on whether the structure of the sentence changes completely or partially. The article presents the examples of the grammatical transformations of inversion, replacement, addition and omission comparing the original text and its translation.