CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN “PERIPHERAL” SYNTACTIC CONSTRUCTIONS IN TRANSLATION PERSPECTIVE

The paper focuses on “peripheral” syntactic constructions which include Continuative Infinitive, Absolute Participial Constructions, and Participle 2 Constructions of the type “If untreated, P” and their Russian counterparts. The above constructions do not have direct equivalents in Russian, which challenges the translators who cannot rely on conventional translation strategies. It explains the relevance of the research and determines the research objective. The authors analyze translation strategies suggested in didactic and academic literature, relate them to actual practices. The empirical data retrieved from the National Corpus of the Russian Language, ant its Russian-to-English subcorpus feature fiction and media discourse which served as empirical data source. The research reveals that in Russian-to-English translation professional translators in practice “ignore” these constructions even in literary and mediatexts translation which is presumably prompted by the lack of clear algorithms of identifying such syntactic models in the original. The authors offer contrastive analysis of the above English “peripheral” structures and the Russian syntactic structures which correspond to the English ones. The method which the authors refer to as “reciprocal projection” was employed to analyze whether similar sentences built in the Russian language could be translated using similar patterns. The authors stage a longitudinal experiment involving 1st and 4th year bachelor students of the same university, trained within the same training programme, realized by the same teaching staff. The above specified conditions of the experiment provided homogeneity of the experiment participants corpus. Students were asked to translate Russian sentences featuring the Russian counterparts of the English constructions, though not linked with a conventionally used translation pattern. The findings testify that, for example, such structures as if untreated, N will … remain on the margins of the translation theory and practice, both professional and student translators “ignoring” them, relying instead on a “safer” conditional clause. The same hold true for the counterparts of the Absolute Participial Construction. As for the Continuative Infinitive Construction it is often translated into Russian as the Infinitive of purpose. The experiment shows that, if specially trained, the students master the translation patterns. Practical translation patterns and didactic guidelines to be relied on in training professional translators and interpreters are suggested.