THE WAYS OF TRANSLATION A.P. CHEKHOV’S OCCASIONAL PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS INTO ENGLISH REFLECTING THE WAYS OF PEOPLE’S ACTIONS (BASED ON THE TRANSLATIONS OF THE PLAY “THE CHERRY ORCHARD”)

Abstract

The article observes the ways of transferring A.P. Chekhov’s occasional phraseological units reflecting people’s way of actions from Russian into English. The research material is the play “The Cherry Orchard” and six of its translations into English (from 1909 to 2015). The scientific novelty lies in the fact that for the first time a comparative study of translations of the play was conducted, performed both by translators who speak the language of translation (English) and also the original language of the play, and only native English speakers. In the course of the research, the author identifies five occasional phraseological units in the original of the play, reviewed and compared the translation techniques used in their translation into English. The work reveals the main translation techniques (the use of English idioms, phrasal verbs, techniques of contextual and grammatical substitution, holistic transformation, concretization, literal translation, concretization and addition), semantic distortions of the original play. Note that all the idioms under consideration are two-component, which may have further complicated translation decision-making.