QUANTITATIVE STUDY OF THE POLYSEMY OF THE LEXEME INTEREST IN THE ORIGINAL AND RUSSIAN TRANSLATION OF THEODORE DREISER’S NOVEL THE FINANCIER

Abstract

The article is devoted to a quantitative analysis of the distribution of the meanings of the polysemous lexeme interest and to a comparative analysis of the ways in which it is rendered in Theodore Dreiser’s novel The Financier (1912) and its Russian translation by M. Volosov, published in 1987. The study identifies six meanings of the lexeme interest according to the Cambridge Dictionary and examines their quantitative distribution in the original text. The research material consists of 133 occurrences of the lexeme interest used as a noun. The quantitative count was carried out using the Python programming language, after which each occurrence was examined in its linguistic context and manually classified semantically in comparison with its translation equivalent. Special attention is paid to the translation transformations used to convey various meanings of the lexeme interest, including grammatical substitutions, modulation, and descriptive translation. The quantitative and comparative analysis of the lexeme interest has shown that the choice of translation equivalents is determined not only by the dictionary meaning of the lexeme, but also by its contextual realization and the genre-stylistic specificity of the literary text. The results obtained are of practical importance and can be used in teaching literary translation.