Translation transformations (the case study of the literary biography “Steve Jobs: A Biography” chapters (subchapters) translation). Part 1.

Abstract

The use of various translation transformations is quite common for a translator who skillfully uses the resources of the languages of the texts on which he/she is working. The question of the application of translation transformations generates interest in academic circles, both domestic and foreign scientists, as the achievement of an adequate translation appears to be the main goal of any translator. The accurate reproduction of the source language into the target one directly depends on the use of translation transformations by the language intermediary. The purpose of our research work is to analyze the translation transformations used while translating the titles of chapters and subchapters of the literary biography “Steve Jobs: A Biography” from English into Ukrainian with an emphasis on certain features of Steve Jobs’ personal self-identification that distinguish this famous personality among the people surrounding him. This is our first attempt to deal with the translation aspect. Translational transformations based on the classifications of L.S. Barkhudarov and V. Karaban have been analyzed. The article draws attention to the fact that most of the translation transformations emphasize Steve Jobs’ contradictory character, his manner of controlling everything and believing that it is enough to want something very much and it will happen, his charisma, individuality, the strong man’s view of self-knowledge and the surrounding world. It has been noted that translators resort to lexical and grammatical transformations, among which we distinguish specification, generalization, modulation, replacement of the syntactic structure of the original as well as a part of speech. For reasons of space of this paper we cannot outline all types of lexical and grammatical transformations being used in the target language of the titles of all forty-two chapters of the literary biography. We see it as promising to continue the work in this direction and to dwell separately on the peculiarities of the translation of certain passages of the text itself to describe the speech characteristics of S. Jobs as a metasymbolic linguistic personality.