Unit 6 practice file

Exercise 1. Translate the following text into the Russian language

Define the structure of the text: the main idea of the text (about what?)

main idea of each paragraph (what exactly?)

Think of the tittle of the text.

Paragraph 1 …………………………………………..

Paragraph 2 …………………………………………..

Paragraph 3 …………………………………………..

TITTLE …………………………………

Translations typically alter numerous features of the source in order to produce matches for those of its dimensions that count in the context it has. But there is one traditionally perceived quality of written and spoken language that is identified not with any particular dimension of an utterance, but with the overall relationship between them – its style.

Style is more than genre. Kitchen recipes are typically translated not into something as vague and undifferentiated as ‘English’, but into ‘ kitchen recipese’, the genre constituted by the conventional features that kitchen recipes have in our tongue. In like manner, you don’t translate French poetry into ’English’, but in

poetry, as the American poet and translator C.K. Williams insists. Poetry is a characteristic social and culture use of language and can therefore count as a genre in our sense, but it comes in many different forms. Beyond the genre, poetry translator has to choose the particular style that he is going to use.

Style is, in some way, imitable. And not just for comic effect. Students of the musical composition develop their skills by writing in the manner of Mozart or Bach, and writers also practise at writing like Flaubert or Proust.

Then the question arises: ‘Should we always follow the style of the original while translating it? Not always and not in all cases. If we agree that ‘style’ is such an individual attribute that it cannot even be controlled by the writer, then every translator has a ‘style’ of that kind in his target language, and the style of all his translations must be more like itself than it can ever be like the style of the authors translated. If we accept the concept that a translation is no substitution for the original, then style is considered untranslatable. If not, translating style is better done by taking a slight distance from the text and following its underlying patterns to emerge by their own force in the process of rewriting in a second tongue.

Exercise 2. Translate the following text into the Russian language. Decide whether

it is a poem, a narrative, an instruction, recommendations or email

message.Analyze the structure of the text- whether it has an

introduction, the main part and the ending.