THE WAYS OF TRANSLATION SOCIO-POLITICAL REALITIES INTO ENGLISH, NOMINATING TITLES, DEGREES AND FORMS OF ADDRESS IN THE TRANSLATIONS OF ANTON CHEKHOV’S PLAY “UNCLE VANYA”

Abstract

The article is devoted to the consideration of ways of translating socio-political realities into English, denoting titles, degrees, titles and addresses. The research material is A.P. Chekhov’s play “Uncle Vanya” and its English translations (published from 1912 to 2020). The scientific novelty lies in the fact that for the first time a comparative study of culturally marked lexical units in seven translations of the work was conducted. In the course of the research, the author identified nine realities that can be divided into two semantic groups: official ranks, estate statuses and nominations derived from them (which include six lexemes) and names of forms of addresses (including three lexical units). To translate these nominations into English, the translators used the following techniques: using a functional analogue (in 17 cases), descriptive translation (in nine translations), contextual substitution (in five examples), preserving the foreign language reality in the translation text (in six cases), using the technique of omission when transmitting six realities in the translation version the works of 2020. It is established that a special translation difficulty is not only the transfer of the cultural flavor of the source text, but also the author’s subtext of the meaning of the original lexical units. The Russian cultural code is lost in all the cases under consideration, but the translators managed to recreate the author’s irony.