TRANSFORMATIONAL OPERATIONS IN DECODING ARMY JOKES IN UNOFFICIAL MILITARY DISCOURSE AS A REFLECTION OF HEURISTIC MECHANISMS OF EMPIRICAL OBSERVATIONS

A lot of research has been carried out to identify the specifics of the military discourse in different approaches, but there have been insufficient studies into the peculiarities of functioning of military discourse at a colloquial level. The article is focused on the profound analysis of decoding army jokes within military context operating in colloquial speech. With the occurrence of the Internet, the joke has gained even more popularity, representing international content. The object of the study is the institutional military discourse expressed in informal communication. The subject of the research is the linguistic and translation peculiarities of the army jokes. We have analysed the examples of army jokes and figured out the possible difficulties that a translator/interpreter can face taking a particular translation decision. This required the implication of the method of content analysis and description. It is pointed out that “army jokes” are traditionally transcoded using a variety of translation transformations based on both linguistic and extralinguistic contexts, often appealing to the pragmatic adaptation of small-format texts. We found that the most common features of army jokes are pragmatic expressiveness, psychological function of the perception of the world due to phenomenon of individual comprehension by representatives of different cultures. When translating the jokes we should bare in mind all the peculiarities of the original text to convey the full meaning on the one hand, and follow the norms of the translated language, on the other. Among translation transformations we could distinguish the following of then: modulation, semantic rearrangement, grammar substitution, contextual replacement, compensation. The stylistic device of pun is found the most difficult for decoding taking a special place in the theory of translatability and translation practice, falling into the list of ‘untranslatable’ phenomena, therefore a translator has to resort to the method of replacement or even compensation. Thus, we can assume that rarely enough in translation practice it is possible to preserve the semantic (denotative, significative), syntactic structure of the statement and the pragmatic level of the utterance.

Keywords: discourse, military discourse, army joke, decoding, transformation