Precedent phenomena and problems of translation: some russian to english examples - Статья

PRECEDENT PHENOMENA AND PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATION: SOME RUSSIAN TO ENGLISH EXAMPLES Raisa N. Mikhail Z. It is widely known that a language is not just a collection of words shaped phonetically and connected via grammatical rules; instead, a language also reflects plenty of cultural peculiarities of those who speak it. Sometimes a foreigner who has thoroughly learned Russian grammar and who, let us assume, knows 3000 words cannot guess the meaning of an elementary phrase, even though all the words in the phrase might be familiar to him. Quite often, this confusion happens because the phrase contains a cultural or historical reference unfamiliar to the non-native speaker. Such widespread phenomena are not only a characteristic feature of the Russian language, but of the majority of world languages. In a language, it is possible to recognize such clusters of words in which the meaning of the parts is not equal to the meaning of the whole phrase. In other words, such a cluster bears a code that is culturally specific. The code is likely to be known only to native speakers of the language, given they are possessors of the particular ethnic knowledge, which Herbert Clark defines as “common ground”. A precedent phenomenon may act as one of the main means for phrase encoding. The usage of precedent phenomena is a characteristic feature of most languages, but in this paper we would like to give some examples of precedent phenomena of the Russian language and to focus on the problem of translation, in other words, problems of decoding cultural peculiarities of the language to non-native speakers. The term “precedent text” was first used in the 1980s by the Russian linguist, Yuri Karaulov, in his work on lingual identity. He defined it as a special text 1) which is meaningful for an individual in cognitive or emotional spheres; 2) which is well-known to the wide milieu of the individual including his predecessors and contemporaries; and 3) the allusion to which is constant in the spoken discourse of the individual [Karaulov 1986:105]. Ten years later, three independent groups of Russian scholars published their works on the concept. In 1997 a series of academic articles and large scholarly works were issued by a group of linguists which included Viktoria Krasnykh, Dmitry Gudkov, Irina Zakharenko and D. Bagaeva. They further defined the term introduced by Karaulov, highlighting that precedent phenomena (henceforth PP) should be known to average members of an ethnic-cultural group. They assume that PP comprise a significant part of the cognitive database of the nation. This database reflects knowledge which is valuable and relevant to all language users as it determines their linguistic worldview. Krasnykh et al. also give the first classification of PP. They differentiate verbal and non-verbal PP. Among the verbal varieties they distinguish precedent texts, precedent situations, precedent names and precedent sayings. They also emphasize that behind each precedent phenomenon there is a certain invariant of understanding - a simplified signifier known to a vast majority of native speakers. In 2000, the Russian linguist Gennady Slyshkin proposed a hypothesis that there exist precedent phenomena relevant to only a few people (for instance, family precedent phenomena or precedent phenomena of a student group).