17. Lexical transformations

In substitutions of lexical units words and stable word combinations are replaced by others which are not their equivalents:

A concrete definition – replacing a word with a broad sense by one of a narrower meaning: He is at school – Он учиться в школеж; У мактабда укийди. He is in the army – Он служит в армии; У армияда хизмат килади.Generalization- replacing a word’s narrow meaning by one with a broad sense: A Navajo blanket – жун адёл; индийское одеяло.Antonymic translation is employed for the sake of achieving faithfulness in conveying content or the necessary expressiveness of sense units. It represents a way of rendering when an affirmative in structure language unit (word, word-combination or sentence) is con­veyed via a negative in sense or structure but identical in content language unit, or vice versa: a negative in sense or structure sense unit is translated via an affirmative sense unit. Cf.: to have quite a few friends мати багато (немало) друзів.Compensation is used when certain elements in the original text cannot be expressed in terms of the language it is translated into. In cases of this kind the same information is communicated by other or another place to as to make up the semantic deficiency.

18. The infinitive

n many cases, however, equivalence in translation can be best achieved if the translator does not try to mirror the grammatical forms in the source text. There are no permanent grammatical equivalents and the translator can choose between the parallel forms and various grammatical transformations. He may opt for the latter for there is never an absolute identity between the meaning and usage of the parallel forms in SL and TL. For instance, both English and Russian verbs have their infinitive forms. The analogy, however, does not preclude a number of formal and functional differences. We may recall that the English infinitive has perfect forms, both active and passive, indefinite and continuous, which are absent in the respective grammatical category in Russian. The idea of priority or non-performed action expressed by the Perfect Infinitive is not present in the meaning of the Russian Infinitive and has to be rendered in translation by some other means. Cf. 'The train seems to arrive at 5." - Поезд, видимо, приходит в 5. and 'The train seems to have arrived at 5." - Поезд, видимо, пришел в 5.A dissimilarity of the English and Russian Infinitives can be also found in the functions they perform in the sentence. Note should be taken, for example, of the Continuative Infinitive which in English denotes an action following that indicated by the Predicate:Parliament was dissolved, not to meet again for eleven years. Парламент был распущен и не созывался в течение 11 лет. Не came home to find his wife gone. Он вернулся домой и обнаружил, что жена ушла.

19. The passive voice

Some ways of expressing the passive voice in both languages may coincide in form and structure. Others should be transformed, in order to achieve faithfulness in translation. English passive forms referring to present tense have mostly no structural equivalents in Ukrainian where the auxiliary verb to be is usually omitted and the past participle acquires other morphological and semantic expression. One more faithful Ukrainian transformation of this passive sentence construction may be achieved by way of conveying it through the so-called middle voice form or -ся/-сь verb. Depending on the form of the passive construction and still more on the lexical verbal meaning, this voice form may have in Ukrainian some still other transformations, which express the same meaning of the passive construction; they may acquire the following outer forms of expression in Ukrainian: a) that of an indefinite personal sentence/clause; b) that of single predicative word/simple nominal predicate; c) a finite form of the verb/simple verbal predicate:

The common English passive voice constructions with the prepositional object as their subject have generally no equivalent passive constructions in Ukrainian. They are rendered then with the indefinite personal forms of the verb.

Some English passive voice constructions often change their outer and inner form and become active voice forms in Ukrainian.