Problems of translating English and German proverbs into Russian: the comparative aspect

Moscow State Region University, 10a, Radio Street, 105005, Moscow, Russia

^* Corresponding author: Oxana_Moskau@mail.ru

Abstract

This article presents the results of the comparative analysis of translatability of English and German proverbs into Russian, which allows to discover specific features of communicants within various linguocultures, which is one of the priority areas of modern linguistic research. The work emphasizes that due to their figurativeness and ethno-cultural specificity, proverbs are a striking example of untranslatability or difficult translatability. This determines the significance of the research under discussion – the increasing need of society for high-quality translation and training of qualified translators. Despite a sufficient number of works devoted to paremiology, the major attention is paid to the semantic and structural features of proverbs in different languages under the absence of comprehensive studies on the translation of proverbial units, which hampers the complete study of the translation problem of paremias. The purpose of the study is to identify close correlations between the proverbs of different languages based on the comparative analysis of the linguistic material of the English, German and Russian languages and a comparison of approaches to the solutions of the problems of their translation. The accomplishment of the stated purpose predetermined the objectives of the study: basing on the analysis of experience concerning proverbs that was accumulated by modern linguistics, to reveal the notion of a proverb; to study the reflection of the linguistic world-picture in the proverbs of the English, German and Russian languages, as well as to conduct the comparative translation analysis. As a result, the authors were able to identify and describe the difficulties encountered in translating English and German proverbs into Russian. The article presents the author's classification of the studied phraseological units in accordance with their translatability from the source language into the target language. All research results are supported by the statistical data.