Authors

The article is devoted to a new type of learner’s dictionary, namely a learner’s dictionary of quotations, whose twofold task consists in assisting budding scientists in both understanding and producing English texts in their sphere of research. As a means of education and cultural enlightenment, a learner’s dictionary is meant to help the student by concentrating the relevant information and presenting it in a readily accessible and easily understandable form. The first learner’s dictionary of quotations compiled for students of languages and literatures by MSU associate professors Lilia Boldyreva and Irina Gubbenet in 2000, is used as an example to demonstrate how the general principles of learner’s lexicography, those of minimization of the word list and optimization of the content, macro- and microstructure of the dictionary, could be realized and modified in the learner’s dictionary of quotations. Present-day lexicography is greatly facilitated by the creation of electronic corpora of English of various sizes – from representative all-embracing national and mega web-based corpora to the so-called “small” computer corpora pertinent to specific research projects. A corpus-based approach to compiling learner’s dictionaries of quotations will make determination of frequency of quotations and popularity of their sources in different styles, genres and disciplines of scientific discourse much easier and more reliable. According to preliminary observations that have to be verified by corpus-based methods, among the most frequently quoted authors in life sciences discourse are Shakespeare, Kipling and Carroll.

The article deals with one of the most complicated aspects of the theory of artistic translation, i.e. recreation of the speech portrayal of a literary character in another language and within a different culture underlying it. The material under analysis is Mikhail Bulgakov’s landmark novel The Master and Margarita and two of its widely acknowledged translations produced by Michael Glenny (1967) and Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1997). The text of the novel abounds with lexical diminutives of all kinds, which enabled us to put forward a hypothesis that diminutives underlie and inform the complex multilayer system of the characters of the novel and their speech portrayals. Thus, diminutiveness is viewed as a linguistically relevant personal index. The research has shown that within the framework of the novel, expressive diminutives possess a large indexical capacity to identify and typify the characters as ‘us’ and ‘them’ as well as provide a rich source of humour and comic relief for those characters who, like Woland’s entourage or the narrator himself, are good at changing masks and voices when confronted with ‘them’. Due to the asymmetry of the Russian and English morphological systems, consistent recreation of the characters’ speech portrayals based on lexical diminutives, does not seem possible in translation, which does not preclude, however, occasionally finding excellent translation solutions.

For texts produced in any natural human language and translated into other natural languages, translation theory has developed a reliable conceptual apparatus and terminology that allow their unbiased comparative analysis leading to valid conclusions as to the merits and demerits of the translations. Although the concept of intersemiotic translation was introduced into translation studies as early as 1959, it has been much less studied than interlingual translation: it is not even very clear to what extent the traditional concepts and metalanguage of translation theory apply to this type of translation. Having analyzed the illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass made by different artists, as well as television commercials and film adaptations of literary works, we show that interactions of semiotically heterogeneous strata within multimodal texts could be viewed as varieties of intersemiotic translation and their study could be based on the traditional categorical and conceptual apparatus of translation theory (the notions of equivalence, adequacy, domestication / foreignization, cultural adaptation, literal / freestyle translation, translation transformations, etc.). It has been revealed, however, that in certain types of multimodal (polycodal) texts the interaction of semiotic codes of different nature has obvious specificities that do not fit into the familiar theoretical paradigm and require an expansion of the framework of translation theory, thus contributing to its further development.

It has become customary to give the translator’s name on the front page of both fiction and non-fiction books, as well as in journal, newspaper and magazine articles. It is only fair that translators should take their rightful place in dictionaries of quotations next to the authors of memorable phrases, many of which would have never crossed the borders of their native linguacultures without the aid of a talented translator. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (ODQ), Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (Bartlett’s) and Konstantin Dushenko’s dictionaries of quotations were analyzed as the most authoritative and popular representatives of British, American and Russian traditions in the field of lexicographic fi xation of memorable utterances. The study revealed the specific approaches of each tradition to the inclusion in the dictionary of foreign-language material, to presenting it in the original language or in translation, with the name of the translator or anonymously. Among the key factors determining the lexicographers’ choice are the epoch when the quoted texts were created, the language they were written in, and their functional and stylistic properties, as well as the position of the dictionary compiler/editor, the personality of the translator, and the prospective user of the dictionary. In the Russian dictionaries, the proportion of anonymous translated quotations, especially literary quotations, is lower than in Bartlett’s, and signifi cantly lower than in the ODQ. In addition, the Russian dictionaries often include several translations of the same quotation with the names of their authors, which is rarely the case in Bartlett’s and completely absent in the ODQ.