Abstract:

The article presents the research results of Tatar culture-specific concepts relative to English equivalents. In the modern world English is considered to be the global language that joins the peoples of different countries who have their own languages and cultures. The number of various ethnic groups of our planet is innumerable as well as the number of languages and cultures. Therefore, it is obvious that the English language does not have any words that name specific culture objects of other peoples both pecuniary and non-pecuniary so it is important to present the objects to the readers or the speakers filling lexical gaps and giving the opportunity to learn unknown culture objects. However, it is not enough to coin a word by using such translation technics as transliteration, transcription or calque. What is more important is to explain the meaning of the word. One of the ways to solve the problem of lexical gaps is to make an explanatory dictionary and to enrich the corpus of the English language. The authors made the draft of the Tatar culture-specific concepts dictionary in English basing the works of Tatar folklore and calculated the semantic distance coefficient for Tatar and English in the field of culture-specific concepts. The coefficient shows the difference in perceiving the world picture by the representatives of various cultures. The bigger is the number of the coefficient the bigger is the difference between the world picture perceiving. The Tatar language is one of the languages spoken in the Republic of Tatarstan, the capital of which is Kazan known as the city where the Universiade-2013, World Football Championship and other world events took place. As annually many tourists visit Kazan so it is necessary to provide them with the English explanatory dictionary of Tatar culture-specific concepts.

Keywords:

Intercultural communication, world picture, culture world picture, language, vocabulary, lexical gap, culture-specific concept, semantic distance coefficient.