ALRJournal. 2021; 5(4): 53-63 | DOI: 10.14744/alrj.2021.56688

Psycholinguistic Peculiarities of Employing Antonymic Translation (based on translation of modern fiction for young adults)

Olena Holub¹, Volodymyr Glushchenko¹, Victoria Roman¹, Viktoriya Domina², Ihor Bloshchynskyi^3
1Department of Germanic and Slavonic Linguistics, Donbas State Teacher’s Training University, Sloviansk, Ukraine
²Department of English Philology, National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine, Ukraine
³Foreign Languages Department, Bohdan Khmelnytskyi National Academy of the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine, Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine

The object of the presented paper is to outline the specific psycholinguistic causes relevant to the translator’s choice of antonymic translation as one of the lexical and semantic transformations used in literary translation. To attain this objective general scientific and linguistic methods have been applied, namely, the method of definitional, syntactic, and contrastive analysis. Samples of antonymic translation have been selected employing continuous sampling from the novel ‘Speak’ written for young adults by the American writer L. H. Anderson and its translation into Ukrainian done by the authors of the paper. The total amount of units under analysis is 252. To verify the validity of the assumption that the translator is naturally inclined to use the antonymic substitution while rendering categorical statements, an experiment has been conducted. 10 students of the English and German languages department have been asked to translate 10 micro-dialogues created specifically for the purposes of the present experiment and containing one word with an element of negative evaluation in its semic structure. The proposition of translations created with the use of antonymic translation turned out to be low. This has been explained by the specific character of the material offered for translation. Psycholinguistic causes of using antonymic translation come to the fore when the translator deals with a literary text and feels empathy for the author, the main character, and the reader. The authors state that antonymic translation receives a powerful impetus from antinomies that act at the interlinguistic level. Though it has been emphasized that psycholinguistic modelling of translator’s activity reveals the significant role of psychological reasons motivating the translator to apply negative-positive, positive-negative inversions, and conversive translation.

Keywords: antonymic translation, young adult fiction, psycholinguistic causes, negative, affirmative, empathy

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