Russian language-specific items and their correlates in translation: The case of chto ni govori ‘say what you will’

What is it about?

The paper deals with Russian language-specific items and their correlates in translation into other languages. The first part (sections 1–3) develops and refines general claims made in earlier publications by the present authors. It discusses various translation strategies and tests the hypothesis of the correlation between the predominant translation strategy and the role of language-specific expressions. The paper also puts forward the claim that the individual style of the author of the original text as well as the translator’s predominant strategy influence the validity of data for the study of language-specific expressions. The second part (section 4), as a case study, uses the texts from the German and English parallel corpora of the Russian National Corpus containing the Russian expression chto ni govori ‘say what you will’ either as a stimulus or as a reaction. The conclusion is that the degree of reliability of corpus data for linguistic purposes may vary depending on the individual style of the original writer and the translator’s strategy.

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