CERTAIN ASPECTS OF VARIABILITY OF LEXICAL CORRESPONDENCES IN THE RUSSIAN AND GERMAN LANGUAGES

Abstract

The article discusses an issue of variation in translation from Russian into German, using the examples of lexical equivalents женщина (woman) – Frau and женщина (woman) – Weib, based on a parallel sub-corpus from the National Corpus of the Russian Language. The paper discusses the interpretation of key lexical units in lexicographic sources in the Russian and German languages, and highlights the main features of how these lexical units objectify the concept of woman. A comparative analysis of the Russian lexical item женщина (woman) and its lexical equivalents in German reveals the distinctive features of these German variants. In particular, it establishes that Frau primarily conveys social aspects of the concept, whereas Weib refers to natural origins. The article notes the expansion of the semantic meaning of the analyzed words in context, compared to their definitions in dictionaries, and highlights the inconsistencies in the translation of the concept “woman” from Russian into German.