Abstract:

Cross-cultural communication is impossible without proper translation of various written sources. Understanding it we designed and tailored our curriculum of practical translation course in such a way that helps facilitate learning process and develop learner’s cognitive awareness of cross-cultural senses. One of the key challenges for the learners is to define “images” of a foreign culture in such language units as phraseological units (idioms). Word-for-word translations of such idioms are rather frequent in press. The aim of this paper is to compare and analyze phraseological units with ‘animal’ component in the Russian and English languages in terms of their translational equivalence and discuss teaching strategies. We attribute human qualities to animals, so the underlying “image”, the inner form of a phraseological unit reflects our perceptions of the world. We included into our study all phraseological units with any attribute related to animal world, not only names of birds and animals, but the parts of their bodies as well. Cultural “images” are projected onto the world in different ways giving new senses to the lexical and phraseological units. Thus, full matches of source and target languages senses are rather rare. As a result, the translator has to find approximations of some level, or in most cases he has to create components of word senses that would be close in their connotative and denotative meanings. Mastering the skill of performing required actions to achieve this goal means possessing deeper insight of it and the knowledge of translational transformations. In broader sense translator’s capacity includes two aspects of the process as to what should be reached and in what way and how it could be done. In our research we investigated several aspects of teaching process and translation techniques employed, in particular, looking at stylistic functions of idioms and ways of conveying the underlying “image” in translation where it is possible. Examples of phraseological units for this research were taken from books written by American and British writers. The findings of this research can be used at universities for training purposes and further investigations in the fields of science related to this topic.

Keywords:

Cross-cultural senses, phraseological units, translation.