Lexical and semantic transformations in translation (on the materials of Abai Kunanbayev's poem)

Abstract

Translation studies is one of the branches of science that has a theoretical basis and is capable of solving literary and linguistic problems.

The main goal of our article is to consider and to discuss the transformations and its types which are used in translation, and the main goal of the study – the use of lexical and semantic transformations as a means of achieving the adequacy of poetic translation.

In the article, we compare and analyze five translated versions of Abai Kunanbayev’s poem «Сенбе жұртқа тұрсада қанша мақтап» (Senbe zhurtka tursada kansha maktap) into Russian, demonstrating that translators have employed various interlingual transformations to achieve translation adequacy, the content and meaning of the source language are conveyed as comprehensively as possible in the translated text through lexical and semantic modifications. Additionally, it illustrates how translators execute these transformations by utilizing lexical units from both the source and target languages, whose meanings may not directly align with those in the original, but are derived through specific logical processes of transformation, which means through lexical and semantic transformations. Applying several methods of grammatical transformation and lexical transformation to the recipient of the translation of the poem, we see that the communicative intention successfully reached the recipient, and they were able to fully convey the meaning. It was found the authors of the Russian translation often used the techniques addition, omission, compensation, replacement, generalization, complete transformation and fragmentation in order to achieve poetic translation adequacy.

We came to the conclusion that the translators managed to achieve the adequacy of the poetic translation, using the techniques of grammatical and lexical transformation when translating into Russian, maintain the appropriate impact on the addressee, and the communicative intention was successfully achieved.

Keywords: poetic translation, grammatical transformation, lexical transformation, differentiation, recipient, communicative intention, techniques.