Translation transformations at the sentence level in economic media discourse

Abstract

The article investigates the specifics of translation techniques providing the transition from units of the original text to communicatively equivalent units when dealing with the translation of English economic texts into Ukrainian. The practical significance of the concept of translation transformations, denoting the replacement of regular counterparts with irregular (contextual) ones due to impossibility or inexpediency of their involvement in a certain content environment, is determined by the normative criterion of translation adequacy and illustrated on the basis of modern electronic media. Differential features of the media economic text, which combines the attributes of journalistic and scientific functional styles of speech, are outlined. Therefore, the emphasis is on certain difficulties encountered by translators when they work with such texts, guided, firstly, by the desire to maintain the emotional intensity of the author`s manner, and secondly, by the need for precise transmission of information. In this way the differential features of English and Ukrainian professional contexts are characterized, it is emphasized that while in the first one figurative means is a common and standardized use, the second tends more to the scientificity of speech and content. Current groups of phraseological units that are common in the English-language economic text as figurative means are identified. It is proved that adequate interpretation of the semantic capacity of denoted concepts by means of translation language does not have a single methodology when translators use such techniques as permutation, replacement of syntactic sentence structure, addition, exclusion. It is established that despite the high level of scientific functionality of professional vocabulary units, for economic texts of the media industry (as having both a strong connotative and informative load) the use of combined translation is the most frequent while zero transformation is involved almost exclusively in headings and subheadings.