ALRJournal. 2021; 5(4): 43-52 | DOI: 10.14744/alrj.2021.55798

Psychological Fundamentals of a Translator’s Work Relevant to Rendering Realia while Translating Fiction for Teenagers

Olena Holub¹, Victoria Roman¹, Viktoriya Domina², Inna Grabovska³, Ihor Bloshchynskyi^4
1Department of Germanic and Slavonic Linguistics, Donbas State Teacher’s Training University, Sloviansk, Ukraine
²Department of English Philology, National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine,
³Department of English for Technical and Agrobiological Specialities, National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine
⁴Foreign Languages Department, Bohdan Khmelnytskyi National Academy of the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine, Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine

The object of the presented paper is to outline the specific features of a teenager’s conception thinking relevant for the translator’s choice of the most adequate way of rendering realia in literary translation. In order to attain this objective general scientific and linguistic methods have been applied, namely, inductive and deductive methods, the method of definitional and contrastive analysis. Realia have been selected from literary works written for teenagers and their translations into Ukrainian by means of continuous sampling. The general amount of the realia under analysis is 83. The authors state that the secondary school pupils’ verbal thinking will develop under such conditions when their social environment provides challenges aimed at involving them into the culture, social life and various kinds of adults’ activities. It has been emphasized that education, encouragement of young person’s interest to reading fiction develop teenagers’ conceptual sphere, their memory, speech skills and imagination. Acquisition of new concepts, intellectual development of a young person demand continuous stimulation. That is why the translator has to solve a very complicated task: he has to balance the ways of rendering realia which bring them close to the recipient’s own culture, and such strategies of handling realia which help to render the national specificity of the concept which is new for the young reader.
As the analysis of the ways of rendering realia in translations of fiction for teenagers shows, the most accurate of them is that which combines transcription (as the instrument of creating specific ethnic colouring) with simultaneous explication of the notion expressed by the transcribed word. Following the terminology introduced by R. Zorivchak, this way is called “combined renomination”. The importance of explication, footnotes, glossaries compiled by the translators of literary works for teenagers has been underlined.

Keywords: concept, world-view, verbal thinking, equivalent-lacking words, realia, ways of rendering realia in translation.

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