Linguistic regularities underlying translation correspondences between Russian and English official discourse noun phrases

The article studies regularities determining lexical and grammatical transformations involved in translating noun phrases in Russian and English. The regularities were revealed while translating official Russian and English texts and comparing Russian and English noun phrases demonstrating equivalent meaning alongside with different lexical and grammatical forms. Translating such language units means having to search for adequate translation correspondences to adapt the translated text to the target language norms. The recurrence of a certain correspondence allows assuming its systemic nature and regularity. The revealed regularities are based on three contrasting characteristics of Russian and English noun phrases and formulated in the form of interlanguage oppositions. The study was conducted on the basis of empirical data and constitutes an inductive analysis. The methodological basis of the study was the translation theory by V.N. Komissarov, which substantiates the need for establishing adequate translation methods for certain linguistic units. The scientific novelty of the study consists in the attempt to systematize the essential differences between Russian and English noun phrases, which require adapting the translated text to the norms of the target language according to certain translation correspondences through appropriate translation transformations. It was found out that Russian demonstrates syntactic explicitness, whereas English syntax is implicit, which entails the need to reduce the Russian phrase and extensify the English one through translation transformations of omission and compensation. It was also discovered that unlike Russian, English displays a freguent use of verbal forms as noun phrase components, so there is a need to carry out part-of-speech transformations. Finally, Russian shows a tendency towards postposition, English towards preposition of the attributive noun phrase component what demands the syntactic structure of a noun phrase to adapt.

adequate translation, noun phrase, translation correspondence, translation transformation, syntactic implicitness, syntactic explicitness, compound noun, interlanguage opposition, nominative attributive meaning, implicitness compensation