Топик: Translatioin of Political Literature
The United States Congress is aimed to control all the financial expenses of the Government.
Целью конгресса Соединённых Штатов является контроль всех расходов правительства.
It is natural that transformation is required while translating sentences with participles of absolute nominative construction.
But often enough grammatical transformations are necessary while rendering conforming forms and constructions for some divergence in their meaning and usage. Such differences of opinions are observed in cases of usage of the category of number. This refers to both countable and uncountable nouns. Countable nouns have single and plural forms in both languages that usually coincide still we observe cases when their usage is different, ex.:
War Atrocity on Peace Conference Eve (news head).
Зверства ( интервентов) накануне мирной конференции
Concerning uncountable nouns, especially those expressing abstract notions we may have much more difficulties because most of them are paradigmatic. For example: ink – чернила, money – деньги and so on.
Increasingly, Southern Africa is becoming the arena of national liberation struggles.
Южная Африка всё больше и больше становится районом национально-освободительной борьбы.
Sometimes, despite the availability of the plural form in Russian – its usage is impossible owing to difference in combination and usage.
The Nile Valley appears to have been unfit for human habitation during the Stone Ages.
Долина Нила, по-видимому, была не пригодна для жизни человека на протяжении всего каменного века (во все периоды каменного века).
In Russian the Stone Age expression is of a historical nature and is never used in plural.
In cases when plural form is to be preserved for it carries some inherent sense one has to apply countable nouns, ex.:
Strikes broke out in many British industries .
В ряде отраслей промышленности Англии вспыхнули забастовки.
Sometimes, owing to some reasons some of constructions has wider usage in one languages comparing with other languages. The best example of this is the passive form – widely used in English mostly due to disappearance of word flexion. As a result, both indirect and predicative object maybe transformed into the objects of passive construction.
Stones and bottles were showered upon a Negro demonstration in Milwaukee by white racists.
Белые расисты обрушили град камней и бутылок на негритянскую демонстрацию в Милуоки (забросали камнями и бутылками).
We should notice that the passive-active transformation can not give sufficient result for in passive construction the stress is being made on the object of action and in the active construction the stress is being made on the agent of action. The widespread use of passive construction in English happens often enough because it is explained by unimportance of the doer of that action and it is most often in newspaper style at the same time the most important is to attract attention to the passage. Since the structure and word order of simple sentence is subject + predicate + object the importance of stylistics is bigger then to distinguish the object one chooses the passive construction.
Divergence are found in some other cases of infinitive usage – infinitive in substantivized constructions (like post-positive attribute) and infinitive expressing following actions, for example:
The president warned of drastic steps to be taken against racialists in the Zambian copper belt.
Президент предупредил, что будут предприняты решительные меры против белых расистов в Медном поясе Замбии.
The infinitive functioning as attribute is translated into object clause with the verb in the Future tense.
The Continuative Infinitive is often mistaken for the infinitive of purpose, but in this function it expresses the action following the after the action expressed by predicate and represents the logical development of things.
The Soviet Union decided to sign the Treaty with Germany and only did to discover that Germany itself violated it two years later.
Советский Союз решил заключить договор с Германией. Но два года спустя Германия сама нарушила его.
The Continuative infinitive very often is used with the adverb only which stresses it. This emphatic function can be rendered in many ways.
Thus, all the considered cases – absence of conforming form, partial correspondence, differences in character and use – urge translators to make necessary grammatical transformations while translating some piece. Those grammatical transformations maybe divided into following types: