NON-EQUIVALENT PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS TRANSLATION: COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH, SPANISH AND RUSSIAN

Abstract

The paper is concerned with the methods for translating non-equivalent phraseological units (hereinafter, PhU) from English and Spanish into Russian. The study is dedicated to the consideration of the linguistic aspects of interlingual speech activity, in other words, translation, as well as a comparative analysis of the methods of communication of the meanings of phraseological units that do not have correspondences in the language of translation. The article presents phraseological units from fiction of the 19th-20th centuries by English and American (Harriet Beecher-Stowe “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, Maugham S. “The Moon and Sixpence”) and Spanish authors (“The Hive” by Camilo Jose Cela). The authors selected phraseological units from the above sources, carried out a comparative analysis of the original and translation in order to identify the ways of conveying the meanings of the units under consideration. All examples are accompanied by linguistic commentary by the authors. A comparative analysis of the ways of translation from different languages to Russian showed a difference in preferences when choosing a translation method. The problem of non-equivalent phraseological units can be solved by using lexical correspondence, modulation or description, which allows to convey the meaning of phraseological units in order to preserve an understanding of a literary work, despite the fact that sometimes the national-cultural specificity of the considered unit may be lost.