러시아어와 영어 관용구 비교

Comparative analysis of phraseological expressions in the semantic field “work – idleness” in the Russian and English languages

For a linguist, one of the most interesting aspects of phraseology is that it cannot be translated into other languages. Even an experienced translator (not to mention an amateur one) may have problems when translating phraseologisms. One should approach translating phraseology very cautiously, since a poor translation may lead to misunderstanding of the meaning of an original phrase or to missing the expressiveness, the emotional or stylistic patterns of a phraseological unit, and therefore to misrepresenting the entire work. That is why a translator must know how to uncover the meaning of phraseological units and to convey their expressive and stylistic patterns. Comparative phraseology is one of the most interesting and still not thoroughly studied areas of linguistics. The present article is devoted to the comparative analysis of some Russian phraseological units within the phrase-semantic field “work – idleness” and their English equivalents. Phraseologisms reflect the national cultures of Russia and England. They contain figurativeness, special expressiveness, and unique originality. The comparative analysis makes a translation of full value possible, and it depends primarily on a correlation between the original language units and the language of translation. 1. When translated, a phraseological unit has an equivalent (meaning + connotation) that does not depend on the context, i.e. phraseologisms of the original language are translated as equivalent phraseologisms of another language. For instance, a Russian expression ‘засучив рукава’ has the equivalent in English - ‘with one s sleeves rolled/turned up’; 2. Phraseological units can be translated with some deviations as approximately equal, analogous forms. For instance, the phraseological unit ‘ждать у моря погоды’ can be translated into English as ‘bide(watch) one s time’; 3. Phraseological units have no direct equivalents or analogous forms and cannot be translated literally into another language. To express the meaning of such phraseologisms descriptive translation can be used. For instance, the phraseological unit ‘работать, не покладая рук’ can be translated as ‘work indefatigably’. Our analysis has shown that many Russian phraseological units (no matter what semantic groups they belong to) have no direct equivalents but only analogous forms in English. When translating phraseological units, it is important to follow the main requirement: phraseologisms can be translated as another language phraseologisms, except when there are no direct equivalents or analogous forms in the target language.