PECULIARITIES OF TRANSLATING THE HEDGING COMPONENT OF THE LEXEME “THINK” INTO THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE

Abstract

Units of linguistic hedging are closely related to the concept of the category of politeness and play the role of a regulator in communication. That is why this phenomenon is most often found in political and social discourse when intercultural tension escalates. Being pragmatic units of language and speech, pragmemes-hedges act as linguistic means of expressing negative politeness as a strategy to avoid offending an interlocutor by protecting one’s interests in a conversation. Hedges in Russian and English are similar in many ways: most of them have equivalents in the language of translation. In some cases, it is very difficult or even impossible to select equivalents which create a certain non-equivalent layer. In addition, since a hedge must preserve its implicitly expressed epistemic modality, it’s denotative and connotative components must be interpreted thoroughly, which requires comprehensive background knowledge of its paradigm. Having analyzed the researched material, the study has also revealed that one hedge can have two different equivalent pairs in the texts of political and public discourse. At the same time, the hedge “I think” is usually translated incorrectly by most translators, since its modal component of meaning is ignored, and possible adequate variants of translation are also given. The work in general is dedicated to the study of the content plan of the hedge “think” in the Russian language and can also become a theoretical basis for future expansion of existing parallel corpora of texts.