- The authors:
Katherine New - Pages: 352-359
- Section: LANGUAGE, TEACHING, INTERPRETING AND TRANSLATION
- URL: http://conferences-ifl.rudn.ru/2686-8199-2020-7-352-359/
- DOI: 10.22363/2686-8199-2020-7-352-359
The paper studies intercultural communication in the methodology and application of diachronic translation in English and modern Russian renditions of Homeric epic. In contrast to previous studies, which do not devote sufficient attention to the study of the methodology of diachronic translation, the paper argues for the necessity of differentiating between an inter-lingual method (based on the difference between the linguistic structures of the original and language translation) and intra-lingual diachronic method, which presupposes linguistic identity. The paper examines the methods of rendering metrical, phonetic, syntactic and stylistic (epic variation, synonymic systems, substantive epithets) organisation of the Ancient Greek original and English and Russian translations.
The paper proposes that rendering Homeric hexameter poses the greatest difficulties for a translator. The contrast between the structure of Greek hexameters and English imitations of the meter is explained in the paper by the varied linguistic structures of the two languages. English, an analytic language, requires an excess of auxiliary words, needed to perform the function of a single morpheme in the source language. The synthetic structure of Russian allows a translator to maintain the same number of words and syllables as a line of Ancient Greek. However, the paper demonstrates that the inter-lingual method of diachronic translation achieves a similarly unsatisfactory result in rendering the metric organisation of Homeric epic into both analytic and synthetic languages since Russian produces cumbersome hexameters as compared to the Homeric metre.
The paper proposes that the transmission of the main organising feature of poetic units, the syntactical structure of the two Homeric epics, also poses a considerable challenge to the theory of diachronic translation, since it requires exact linguistic identity between the source and target languages. The lucidity of Homeric verse is lost in transmission from a synthetic into an analytic language, but is regained when the linguistic structure of the source and target language coincide. The paper demonstrates that the application of the inter-lingual diachronic method to Homeric epic poses a challenge to translators working with analytic languages on a metrical, phonetic and syntactic level. Translations into synthetic languages have a clear advantage in transmitting Homeric epic, which arises from linguistic identity between Russian and Ancient Greek. The paper attempts to prove that the transmission of the stylistic organisation of Homeric epic requires the translator to discover poetic devices, functionally identical to those employed in the poetic system of the original.
Keywords: translation, intercultural communication, Homeric epic
Katherine New
New College, University of Oxford Oxford, United Kingdom
e-mail: katherine.new@new.ox.ac.uk ORCID iD: 0000-0003-3931-3031
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