SPECIAL ASPECT MEANINGS OF THE RUSSIAN VERB IN THE VIETNAMESE LANGUAGE CONTEXT (BASED ON THE TRANSLATION OF DEAD SOULS BY N. GOGOL)

• Main Authors: Marina Borisovna Tashlykova, Thu Ha Bui
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Science and Innovation Center Publishing House 2018-02-01
• Series: Sovremennye Issledovaniâ Socialʹnyh Problem
• Subjects: аспект; вид глагола; типологические исследования; русский язык; вьетнамский язык; перевод
• Online Access: http://journal-s.org/index.php/mrsp/article/view/10433

The problem of rendering semantic nuances of Russian aspect forms in another language appears not only when the translation language has no matching grammar category, but also when such categories exist but their structure and the meaning of aspect oppositions have their own peculiarities. It is true about the Vietnamese language. In the course of our previous research, we explored the way special aspect meanings of the Russian verb are represented in Vietnamese. We studied the basic means of such representation. The aim of this article is to find out the regular occurrence of such means while translating Dead Souls by N. Gogol. The task needs solving because there is another problem, the one being more common. We imply the problem of translation adequacy evaluation and the understanding of findings and losses caused by translation. As a result of our research we have found out that certain fragments of the translation are more adjacent to the original. These are the fragments in which aspect semantics of the verb form is supported by the context (we call these contexts “strong”). This lexical tool makes the translator’s task easier. In case such units are absent (i.e. “weak” contexts), the translator has to look for some specific means of the Vietnamese language which are able to describe the situation properly. Sometimes we fail to find necessary grammar and/or lexical means. In this case, some shades of the original meaning are left unexpressed. Practical implications. The results of the study may be used to specify a number of issues of the contemporary aspectual theory, namely the special aspectual meanings and their description methods, importance of the context in the representation of aspectual semantics, possibilities of the Russian verbs’ aspectual meanings representation in a language of a different typological system.