ON RENDERING THE MEANINGS OF UKRAINIAN STYLISTIC SUFFIXES WHEN TRANSLATING INTO ENGLISH

Abstract

This article studies English attributive genitive constructions as a way of rendering stylistic meanings of the augmentative and diminutive suffixes when translating from Ukrainian.Affixation plays a much more significant role in enriching words with new senses in Ukrainian than in English. Hence the importance of finding certain means of translation compensation techniques which, when applied to the languages that belong to different structural types, would make it possible to preserve all the emotional-logical characteristics obtained by Ukrainian words through stylistic suffixes.Attributive genitive construction comprises 3 basic elements, namely Indefinite Article + Noun that describes / characterises the object, Preposition “Of” and Indefinite Article + Noun that name the object: a doll of a girl – a girl is like a doll, or in Ukrainian “lialechka”, “krasunechka”, “krasunika”, “divchatochko”, “beautiful divcha”, etc. The comparison to a doll which establishes the semantic basis of the English construction is preserved in Ukrainian through numerous versions of endearment-diminutive suffixes that can render all the necessary connotations and emotional colouring.Comparative analysis that embraces 500 examples of English genitive constructions and their Ukrainian equivalents in the texts that represent different genres proves that in English attributive genitives effectively compensate the lack of affixes, that form the foundations of the word-building system in Ukrainian. In other words, the stylistic functions which in Ukrainian are performed by affixes, in English are realised through different language means with attributive genitives being one of them.The choice of the first element in the construction shapes negative or positive type of the evaluation which the whole construction carries. The meanings of the words with negative evaluation, such as “devil”, “hell”, “brute”, are rendered in Ukrainian through the augmentative suffixes, whereas the meanings of the words with positive evaluation, such as “slip”, “gem”, “beauty”, are rendered through adding diminutive suffixes to the basic forms of the words.The article concludes that genitive constructions are an effective way to render the meaning of Ukrainian words with stylistic suffixes; it ensures the preservation of expressive-evaluation segments of the word meaning, as well as connotations when translating into English. English genitives and Ukrainian stylistic suffixes can be regarded as translation equivalent. Belonging to the different language levels they perform the same function, namely that of emotional-expressive enrichment of the language.