REPRODUCING THE SPEECH IMAGE OF THE INVISIBLE MAN IN THE NOVEL BY H. WELLS TRANSLATED BY MYKOLA IVANOV

Abstract

The article deals with the study of the methods of forming and reproducing the speech portrait of the Invisible Man in the Ukrainian translation of H. Wells’s novel The Invisible Man, carried out by Mykola Ivanov. The actual value of the work is due to the growing attention of modern translation studies to the analysis of characters’ speech as an important component of the artistic image, and to the need to preserve the individual stylistic features of the original during translation. The methodological basis of the study is made up by the research of T. Tsepenyuk, Z. Shevchuk and M. Berezhna. Based on their conclusions, the author considers the speech portrait as a combination of stylistic and linguistic characteristics that distinguish a character from others and form an impression of his/her social and psychological nature. The study aims to identify the reproduction features of the Invisible Man’s speech image as translated by Mykola Ivanov. The novelty of the work lies in the analysis of various speech manifestations of the Invisible Man in the first chapters of the novel both in the original and translation: from emotional, elliptical exclamations in the first scenes to restrained, laconic or, conversely, syntactically complicated phrases in subsequent dialogues and monologues. The analysis shows the ways the book style vocabulary, complex grammar structures, emphasis and specific reiterations form the image of an educated, restrained, but irritated person. Against this background, translation transformations used by Mykola Ivanov are analyzed: calque, adaptation, transposition, grammatical and stylistic substitutions, sentence segmentation, etc. Special attention is paid to how these techniques affect the emotional and stylistic expression of the main character’s speech. It is concluded that although the general features of the Invisible Man’s speech are generally preserved in the translation, a number of stylistic features of the original – primarily emphatic, bookish, and sarcastic – are in many cases leveled out due to objective differences between the languages and translation decisions. As a result, the image of the Invisible Man in the translation is partially shifted towards a neutral, more smoothed speech style. The prospects for further research lie, in particular, in analyzing the speech portraits of other characters in the novel and their reproduction in Ukrainian.