RUSSIAN TRANSLATED DISCOURSE RESEARCH: PATTERNS OF LEXIS USAGE AS LINGUISTIC INDICATOR OF TRANSLATION UNIVERSALS REPRESENTATION

 

YEKATERINA KRASNOPEYEVA^*

 

 

Summary

 

This paper reports on the results of a research project devoted to investigation into the nature of translations into Russian, within the framework of corpus-based Translation Studies. The paper discusses a number of theoretical aspects behind translation universals research, developing the concept of Translated Discourse. Case studies conducted as part of the research project are described. The case of explicitation is discussed in detail. This work is a part of the Russian Foundation for Humanities supported project (No. 15-54-00020).

 

Key words: Russian language, translationese, translated discourse, universals of translation, explicitation, corpus-based methodology.

 

Introduction

 

Studying universal inherent qualities of translations remains one of the key issues in today’s Translation Studies. The last two decades marked the emergence of a range of hypotheses discussing potentially uniform unique features of translations characterized as the universals of translation (e.g. simplification, explicitation, normalization, see Baker, 1993). In search of these features, a variety of languages and language pairs are being studied with the help of corpus-based methodology (Ibid.). Corpus-based Translation Studies and potential universals theory are evolving alongside each other. Translation universals are viewed as descriptive constructs, working hypotheses that require constant empirical verification. Detailed description and conceptualization of translated discourse characteristics in a variety of languages is essential for further development and refinement of theoretical concepts concerning the nature of translation.

Research project described in this paper studies Russian translated discourse and attempts to use lexis as linguistic indicator to test a number of hypotheses against the backdrop of Russian narrative prose corpora. The paper is organized as follows: in section Theoretical Framework the concept of Translated Discourse is discussed. The following sections describe qualitative and quantitative methodology of the project. The case study of lexeme который