VERBALISATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL AUTHOR’S CONCEPT DEATH IN THE TRANSLATION OF “THE SECRET HISTORY” BY DONNA TARTT

Abstract

The article aims at defining specific ways of rendering of the verbalised representation of the individual author’s concept in translation based on the concept DEATH in “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt (2014) and its Ukrainian translation by Bohdan Stasiuk (2020). To fulfill the objectives of the study, the author employs a comparative, conceptual, contextual and translation analyses of the source and target texts. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the fact that it is the first attempt to analyse specific translation strategies and techniques used for rendering the individual author’s concept DEATH verbalised in the novel by D. Tartt in Ukrainian translation with regard to its notional, axiological and figurative components. According to the findings of the research, the individual author’s concept DEATH is verbalised in the source text both on lexical and syntactic levels. Its notional component is represented mainly by such lexemes as “death”, “murder”, and the cognate words “killer”, “murderers” etc. The axiological constituent of the concept DEATH in the novel is dual in nature and comprises the following attributes: “horrible”, “horrific” and “evil” (negative); “necessary”, “justifiable” and “fair” (positive). The figurative component of the concept DEATH acquires specific associations in the novel due to several main metaphorical models, namely: DEATH IS A FILM, DEATH IS AN EXPERIMENT, DEATH IS A GAME. The target text verbalisation of the concept DEATH is characterised by the balance of translation strategies of domestication and foreignisation, use of standard and variant equivalent translation, as well as translation techniques of modulation and particularisation. Prospects for further scientific research involve analysing the components of the individual author’s concept DEATH verbalised in other novels of the author and establishing the correlation between the employed ways of its translation.