LEXICAL INTENSIFIERS IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION AND WAYS OF THEIR REPRODUCTION INTO UKRAINIAN

Abstract

Modern translatology focuses, among other things, on an in-depth study of units belonging to different linguistic levels (from phonopoetics to cognitive stylistics), which taken together, constitute an exceptional flavor of a literary work. Nothing may be considered secondary or accessory in a work of fiction, at least in its best versions; hence the interest in the smallest building blocks of non- radical parameters such as discourse words, interjections and even affixes. Their faithful rendering in translation requires a thorough and complete understanding of linguistic material, socio-historical, ethno-cultural and psychological dimensions in the original and target culture. An intensifier is an integral element of the texts of different types and genres. Due to their expressiveness and figurativeness intensifiers occupy a special position in the arsenal of artistic means of fiction. They belong to the basic building blocks, through which the creative personality of the author as well as the specific features of his/her characters may show up. Intensifiers are widespread in literary discourse in the English and Ukrainian languages and this greatly helps the translator to render them properly. At the same time these units demand great efforts and special attention to reproduce them into the target language. The article investigates peculiarities of lexical intensifiers’ functioning in D. Steel’s novels and the ways they are reproduced in the Ukrainian translations. It discusses the reasons for different translation transformations and motivation of their application. The faithful rendering of intensifiers in translation requires a thorough and complete understanding of linguistic material, socio-historical, ethno-cultural and psychological dimensions in the original and target culture. Normally translators are in a constant search for correspondences from vast resources of the Ukrainian language. Equivalents established due to the identity of the denotatum or long-standing traditions of language contacts, context-sensitive variant correspondences and translation transformations of different types (substitution, transposition, addition, omission, recategorization) were frequently used.