TYPICAL WAYS TO TRANSLATE TITLES OF MODERN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE BOOKS

Abstract

The article deals with typical translation transformations and techniques used while translating book titles belonging to the contemporary English-language fiction into Ukrainian. In this work it has been stated that book titles belong to the category of onyms (proper names) in terms of structure (expression of the title by a single lexeme, simple nominal phrase, word-combination or different types of sentences) and functions (nomination and identification of a work of fiction in order to distinguish it from any other publication of a similar literary genre). The study applies an interdisciplinary approach to a comprehensive consideration of the problem of translating book titles at the interface of philology and translation sciences, since the method of translating onyms is often determined by the lexico-grammatical, semantic and pragmatic features of the source language unit, which poses a difficult task for the translator to implement not only nominative, but also informative, cultural, emotive, and expressive functions when translating a book title, as well as to convey its pragmatics (as part of the marketing strategy). It has been found out that depending on the expression of the original book title, translators utilize word-for-word translation or calque, antonymic translation, selecting dictionary equivalents (in case of polysemy), use omission to avoid redundancy, etc. It has been determined that background knowledge about the content and plot of a novel influences the translator’s choice of certain grammatical constructions or grammatical categories, such as the category of noun gender (it is not peculiar to English, as it was lost at a certain period of its historical development), which is primarily due to the different structure of Slavic and Germanic languages.