Kateryna Buhaichuk
Khmelnytskyi National University
Scientific Supervisor: PhD, Tarasova O.V.
TRANSLATION OF HOMOPHONES: A CASE STUDY
The article deals with the phenomenon of homophones in the English language and difficulties that arise during their translation. The ways of transmission homophones from the source language (English) into the target language (Ukrainian) and possibilities of preservation author’s pragmatics are highlighted.
Keywords: translation, homophones, source text language, target text language, grammatical transformations.
The fact that the English and Ukrainian languages belong to different branches of the Indo-European family of language and to different structural types specifies divergences in their structure, sets of their grammatical categories, forms and constructions that make up a large group of difficulties in translation.
Difficulties in translation arise when the grammatical phenomena of the source text language (STL) and the corresponding grammatical phenomena of the target text language (TTL) have different functional characteristics, or when one of the languages lacks some grammar category and, therefore, has no corresponding form. For example, English possesses the morphological categories of the article or the gerund lacking in the Ukrainian language; whereas, in Ukrainian, there is a category of adverbial participle missing in the English language. Unique categories in one of the languages can occur at the syntactic level as well.
Undoubtfully, a set of grammatical transformations can be applied in any process of translation. Grammatical transformations are changes in the grammatical structures and categories in the process of translation. They are often the matter of translator’s individual choice and, in general, strongly depend on stylistic peculiarities and communication intent of the source text.
In our case, we are talking about homophones. In English, Western Europe, and some East Asian countries, a homophone is a word that has the same sound as another word but different meaning and spelling. This can be compared with a homonym, which has the same spelling and sounds the same but has a different meaning. It may also differ in spelling. The English language has a huge number of homophones, while Ukrainian is not rich in it. Homophones are often used to create puns and to deceive the reader (as in crossword puzzles) or to suggest multiple meanings. The last usage is common in poetry and creative literature [3].
Studying English homophones make us often think seriously about the meaning of what we’ve heard. How to cope with them?
Firstly, it is necessary to know about the existence of types of homonyms. There are five different types of them:
Homograph – some homophones are similar in spelling but different in meanings. They are called homographs. For instance, “hail” meaning an ice storm, and “hail” meaning something that occurs in large numbers, such as “a hail of bullets.”
Homonym – some words have the same pronunciation but different meanings. These are called homonyms. For example, “cite,” “sight,” and “site.”
Heterograph – words that have different spellings but are pronounced in the same way are called heterographs (“write” and “right”).
Oronym – homophones that have multiple words or phrases, having similar sounds, are called oronyms. For instance, “ice cream” and “I scream.”
Pseudo-homophone – in this type of homophone, one of the pair of words is not a real word, such as “groan” and “grone” [2].
Interlingual homonyms, better known as “translator’s “false friends”, can be classified into 3 categories: 1) the meaning of the Ukrainian word partially coincides only with the English equivalent; 2) Ukrainian word has a meaning the English equivalent lacks; 3) Ukrainian and English equivalents have a cardinal difference.
A vivid example of the coincidence of word meanings in different languages can be found in Jack Delany’s novel “The Case of The Lower Case Letter”. The author has introduced interesting homophones in his novel to confuse and intrigue, to hold the reader’s attention and interest till the end of the story.
“edith. i’m not going to whine, i’ve had a good life. i’ve found wealth and happiness as a teacher, a seller of knowledge. but i find myself depressed beyond hope … and so i’m choosing the hour and manner of my own demise. i have treated you badly. i demanded you dyed your brown curls blonde. i thought i could buy you when i should have won your love. i called you a witch. i’d complain: where’s the woman i married? i said you ate too much. if i wanted change, i could have used a carrot rather than a stick. you probably wanted to wring my neck. forgive me. farewell.” [1]
We have managed to convey homophones from the source to the target language in the following way:
“Едіт я не винний, що ми були такі чужі. в нас було цілком нормальне життя. щасливцем я попав під вал вчительської професії і втопав у науці. проте в нашому домі атмосфера була нестерпною, тому я йду з цього нікчемного життя. я як той вбитий жук, який скитається й не може знайти собі місця. ти була володаркою мого серця, втіленням діамантової сльози моєї душі, хоча ніколи від мене цього так і не почула. червоні шкіряні туфлі-каблучки й досі не йдуть з моєї голови. мов навіть восьми планет галактики не вистачить описати моїх почуттів. та ще й досі жоден ювелір не обробив коштовного каменю тих каратів, яких ти варта. я б ні за що не змінив наше подружнє життя, хоч і було воно далеко не бездоганним. пробач за все! прощавай!”
As mentioned above, homophones are not so widespread in the Ukrainian language, but in this case, we tried to transfer the original meaning of the used words. In the source language, we can observe all the types of homophones, while translating it into the target language we used only two types of them – homographs and oronyms.
There are a lot of examples of an interlingual homonymy in English and Ukrainian, and the translator, first of all, should remember that the wrong transfer of these lexical units can lead to a false understanding of foreign texts. The phenomenon of homophones deserves special attention as it is one of the global problems of linguistics.
References
- Delany J. Short Stories: The Case of The Lower Case Letter. http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/ CaseLowe950.shtml
- Gorfein D. On the Norming of Homophones. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51398474_On_the_norming_of_homophones
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophone
- Homophones: the Most Confusing Words in English. https://www.oxford-royale.com/articles/efl-homophones/