WORD FORMATION IN SCIENCE FICTION AND PECULIARITIES OF ITS TRANSLATION (FRANK HERBERT’S “DUNE”)

Abstract

The article highlights the issue of the peculiarities of word formation in English science fiction texts and the specifics of the translation of author’s neologisms on the example of the first novel from the series “Dune Chronicles” by Frank Herbert – “Dune”. When translating science fiction, certain difficulties may arise related to the author’s neologisms and their functioning in the text. In order to achieve the adequacy of the author’s neologisms’ translation, it is worth paying attention to both the methods of their word formation, etymology, and the use of borrowings from natural languages. The novelty of the study is a detailed analysis of the author’s neologisms in “Dune”, the interaction of foreign language borrowings (mostly from Arabic, as well as Hebrew, Latin, and Germanic languages) and neologisms derived from English. We define the peculiarities of word formation and translation of science fiction as the reality created by the author within the fictional text, which involves its own language, the use of artificial languages and their relation to natural languages. The lexical-semantic analysis of the author’s neologisms proved that these linguistic units should be considered in the context of the selected science fiction text, since they are an integral part of it, which determines the linguistic uniqueness of the author’s neologisms.
In “Dune” the translation of the author’s neologisms includes loan translation for English terms with a combination of word formation methods (compounding). In some cases, it is appropriate to use specification. Transcoding (transliteration) is used for foreign loanwords, which in science fiction are mostly treated as non-equivalent vocabulary.
The original text of Frank Herbert “Dune” (1965) and the Ukrainian translation of Kateryna Pityk and Anatoliy Pityk “Dune” (2017) were selected for the study.