SLANG AND JARGON WORDS IN CONTEMPORATY UKRAINIAN PROSE IN THE ASPECT OF TRANSLATION

Abstract

The thesis sets out to determine colloquial stylistically-marked words in modern Ukrainian prose and to analyze ways of their rendering in English translations. Special attention is focused on slang and jargon words. Slang refers to words, phrases and uses that are regarded as very informal and often restricted to special context or peculiar to a specifi ed profession class and the like. Slang words are used in specifi c social groups, like teenagers. The main trait that
distinguishes jargon from the rest of a language is special vocabulary – including some words specifi c to it, and often narrower senses of words that outgroups would tend to take in a broader sense. Ukrainian literature, almost completely ignored among an English-speaking readership for decades, has in recent years become more and more popular due to new and aesthetically convincing English translations. Linguistic analysis of novels “Depesh Mod” and “The Museum of Abandoned Secrets” by modern Ukrainian writers Serhiy Zhadan and Oksana Zabuzhko proved that they are rich in slang and jargon words. Analysis of their translations (made by Myroslav Shkandrij and Nina Shevchuk-Murray) showed that aforementioned lexical phenomena set a problem of their rendering into English (because of differences in emotional effects which they create and due to lack of equivalent phenomena in the target language), and may cause application of transformational translation techniques (descriptive translation, loan translation, omission, etc.). We concluded that coloring was partially lost in rendering slang and jargon words of modern Ukrainian prose into English.