Translation of non-standard units in the French-Ukrainian literary area

The article aims at describing the sociolinguistic problems of literary translation. Supported by recent studies, the analysis leads to concrete proposals of developing methods of translating non-standard elements of modern French literature into Ukrainian. The factors of non-standard elements adequate rendering in the Ukrainian translation of the French fiction text are determined. 

Mimetic reported speech and its translation from French to Polish in literary texts

This article deals with the French-to-Polish translation of a specific case of reported speech: the investigated examples from literary texts are, from a semantic point of view, paraphrases by the narrator, who formulates the words of the characters in reported speech. They do not, however, only express his point of view (this is a form of reported speech called mixed or mimetic). In the Polish text, the discourse of the characters includes graphic, grammatical or lexical ant indicators, as well as the interpretation of statements in the context of the translation ‘s reader. A few important guidelines are given, on the basis of which the reader can interpret the passages in which the reported speech comes close to direct speech or to speech in a situation. Attention has also been paid to the modifications that the narrator’s speech undergoes when their discourse creates the context of the speech of the character. 

The Role of Semantic Inheritance in Machine Translation

The aim of this paper is to present the role of the semantic inheritance in the one of the linguistic models for machine translation – the object-oriented approach by Wiesław Banyś. In the first part, the author outlines the general concepts of the theory and provides several examples of its application in the disambiguation process. The second part is fully focused on the question of the hierarchy of object classes and the semantic inheritance of attributes and operations. In fact, it is precisely thanks to the hierarchy postulated in the theory that the linguistic description becomes effective and fully applicable in computer systems. 

A Letter of Thomas Becket

In a recent article (Löfstedt 2016), the author argued that Thomas Becket’s three French letters from his exile preserved by Garnier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence as a part of his versified Vie de Saint Thomas (ed. E. Walberg 1922) were not translated from the Latin letters (ed. Anne Duggan 2000). Further, she raised the suspicion that the Latin letters – considered to be authentic, but preserved only in copies – had been altered. Focusing on the beginning and the end of the letter Expectans expectaui addressed to Henry II, this present article compares its Latin text to the French text. The French letter is written by an intelligent and sincere friend of the King, while the Latin letter has been « retouched » to let the letter-writer appear as verbose and unintelligent, and, then, as a  sanctimonious, vicious enemy of the King. Apparently,the person responsible for this manipulation tried to destroy all affection the King might still have had for Thomas Becket, because he did not want Thomas Becket to be invited to return from his exile. 

Applied phraseology and new disciplines: phraseodidactics and phraseotranslation

Phraseodidactics, also known as didactics of phraseology, is a new emerging research discipline within the scope of applied linguistics. It is an interdisciplinary field with elements of phraseology, glottodidactics, as well as contrastive linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and sociolinguistics. Phraseodidactics, in accordance with its objectives, examines the processes associated with the natural assimilation of collocations, idioms, proverbs and other reproducible word forms in the mother language, and, foremost, processes related to the teaching and learning of these structures in the second and subsequent languages. Idiomatic expressions are understood here as established combinations of at least two words with a reproducible character. The scope of phraseology also includes compound wordsand fixed collocations. In other words, the didactics of phraseology aspires to deal with everything that is associated with the most effective teaching and learning of broadly understood phraseology. On the other hand, phraseotranslation, as a specialized interdisciplinary science postulated in this text, is situated at the crossroads of phraseology, translation studies, contrastive studies and phraseodidactics. Recently there is a growing need for an efficient interlinguistic translation; the education of future translators of foreign languages develops more and more, but the problem of phraseologization in translation is still very rarely undertaken in scientific research. An effective translation implies equivalent messages in two different linguistic codes, which becomes extremely difficult in case of phraseology. The multiple-word structures entrenched in natural languages are therefore a major challenge in the process of translation and can be a prominent difficulty even for professional translators.