Grammatical equivalents in translation

Category of number

Table – tables BUT Twenty-one tables

Oats – овес

Measles – корь

Ink – чернила

Information – данные

Category of tense

Both English and Russian distinguish such forms of he predicate words as present, past and future and their grammatical meanings.

*He lives in Moscow – He lived in Moscow

*He said that he lived in Moscow – он сказал, что живет в Москве (sequence of tenses)

Category of gender

The semantic content and function vary to a greater extent. Russian distinguishes among 3 manifestation of gender: masculine, feminine and neutral, which are formally expressed in the following ways:

• Demonstrative pronouns (этот, эта, это),

• Endings of verbs (шел, шла),

• Inflexions of the nouns (стол_, вода, окно),

• Pronominal substitution (зверь- он, дверь- она).

In English the same 3 genders are distinguished, but there is only one-way to express the distinction:

• Pronominal substitution.

There’s no such thing as agreement in gender or difference in inflexions and endings in English. Consequently the category of gender is expressed by personal, possessive, reflexive pronouns. The thing is that gender is not marked in English, which leads to the importance of context:

Artist – художник (-ца)

Student – студент (-ка)

When we translate fables, where personification often takes place, such things become important:

The Fly: English – masculine, Russian – feminine

Grammatical universals

These categories are found in all languages, no language can function without them. These are so-called deep grammatical categories, that are rather semantic than formal, such as object process, quality, relation, actor, goal of action, instrument, cause – effect etc. The formal ways in which these deep structures are manifested are numerous. Moreover, context, which in one language may be described grammatically, may be expressed lexically in another language. E. g. English doesn’t distinguish between perfective and imperfective aspect, which is so typical of Russian:

*Что делал Иванов на протяжении 10 лет?” – “What did he do during these 10 years?”

*Все или почти все. Что он сделал? Ничего или почти ничего”. – “Everything or almost everything. What did he achieve? Nothing or almost nothing.”

What is conveyed by perfective and imperfective aspect in Russian is expressed by two different words in English.

There are cases when grammatical meanings are not rendered in translation at all. That means hat grammatical form is not used freely according to is own meaning. It is predetermined by merely linguistic factors such as syntactic constructions, rules of agreement, government and in these cases we speak of a bound use of grammatical form. On the whole the choice of grammatical equivalent is determined by several factors:

• The meaning inherent in grammatical form itself: “стол – столы / table – tables / живет – lives

• The lexical character of the word or word group used in this / that form. “Other philosophies – другие философские течения” the use of plural form here is impossible because the noun itself isn’t used in plural in Russian. “industries – другие области промышленности”

• Factor of style. There are cases when the stylistic differences between two languages are not in favor using this or those grammatical phenomena. E. g. Both English and Russian have the passive voice construction, but in Russian I is a characteristic feature of the bookish style. Though we can theoretically translate a sentence written in colloquial style using the passive construction, the translation will sound rather awkward.

*John was met by his brother. – The delegation was met by a group of students.

Both English and Russian make use of historical present, but only in English this form is used in newspaper headlines.

*Prominent scientist dies. – смерть знаменитого ученого.

• Frequency of use. Speaking about his factor we can say that rare forms of words may also constitute a serious obstacle to a proper communication load. Russian uses both subordinate clauses and verbal adverbs (деепричастия) to express adverbial relations. In many cases the translation is rather heavy and sounds a bit unnatural if we don’t know what every language prefers. English prefers subordination whereas Russian prefers coordinate structures.