Conceptual-philosophical and linguocultural substantiation of transformations in translating a poetical text from English into Japanese and Chinese: a comparative-typological aspect

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17721/1728-242X.2020.26.27-31

Abstract

The paper focuses on the problem of translation and translatability of poetic texts with regard to genetically different languages that have dichotomically opposed writing systems, particularly alphabetic and character based ones. On the one hand these are the languages that belong to the Indo-European family, namely, English, Ukrainian and Russian and, on the other, the East Asian languages, particularly, Japanese and Chinese. The core of the study is Robert Burns' poem "A Red, Red Rose" translated into the above-mentioned languages. When translating this poem from English (phonetic) into Japanese (character-syllabic), or Chinese (ideographic) languages, an attempt to convey poet's feelings embodied in the original context with the help of characters, the structural and semantic properties of which are dichotomously opposite to the alphabetic graphemes of the English writing, it is necessary to make substantial lexical and grammatical transformations that do not allow to preserve the identity of the original. In a sense, such translation can be viewed as an attempt to use characters as phonetic signs that correspond to certain lexemes of the original. At the same time, replacing words written in the phonemic way (letters) by whole graph-semantic units (characters), leads, on the one hand, to the loss of specific connotations of the original, and on the other, to the emergence of semantic interference due to multiple meanings of the most characters, therefore preventing adequate perception of the original content by native speakers of the Japanese or Chinese languages. Characters are intended, first of all, to directly fix thoughts as ready-made word forms. Consequently, when translating, or more precisely, interpreting the mental code of the English written tradition, and accordingly poetry, using Japanese / Chinese language, you need to find a way to translate it into the mental code of the Japanese or Chinese poetic tradition. Only by getting more or less successful result one can consider the goal of the adequate translation accomplished. So, this paper suggests an approach to translating a poetic text from a phonetic into a character language on the basis of semantic and linguocultural analysis of the dichotomically opposed cultural concepts.