Strategies of Reporting Verbs’ Interpretation in Modern Russian Translations of Fiction

• Main Author: Anastasiya V. Urzha
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Volgograd State University 2018-12-01
• Series: Vestnik Volgogradskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta. Seriâ 2. Âzykoznanie
• Subjects: translation; dialogue; reporting verb; emotiveness; gesture; domestication; foreignization
• Online Access: https://l.jvolsu.com/index.php/en/component/attachments/download/1886

The research presented in the article focuses on the phenomenon of substituting reporting verbs that introduce direct speech (e.g. say) by words with emotive and evaluation meanings in Russian translations of fiction. The paper systematizes and describes grammatical, semantic and stylistic aspects of this phenomenon revealed in typology, studies of the Russian language, stylistics and translation studies up to nowadays. Two opposing views on the issue existing in Russian and European translation critics are presented in the paper: on the one hand, substitution of repeated reporting verbs by emotive ones helps to avoid tautology and monotonousness of the dialog frame, on the other hand, it interferes and distorts the semantics of the original. From the widespread linguocultural attitude, interpreting this issue as a domestication feature in translation, the author offers to shift to functional attitude, focusing on pragmatic effects of such substitutions. The material of the research is represented with the corpus of modern Russian translations of narratives for children. The results of the comparative analysis of texts and statistic data confirm that the substitution of reporting verbs by emotive words and nominations of gestures is regularly found in both domesticating and foreignizing translations, being connected mostly to the specific features of the target children audience and high emotiveness of the fragments where reporting verbs occur. These results enable us to adjust current estimations of the phenomenon in question in the translation assessment, adding functional view on its context and pragmatic effects.