USING ANTONYMIC TRANSLATION IN RENDERING ENGLISH PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS INTO UKRAINIAN

Abstract

The article considers phraseological units and antonymic translation as one of the most effective methods of transmission of lexical units. Antonymic translation is shown to be an independent type of translation. Antonymic translation is defined as a translation mode whereby an affirmative (positive) element in the ST is translated by a negative element in the TT and, vice versa, a negative element in the ST is translated using an affirmative element in the TT, without changing the meaning of the original sentence. It is not a word-for-word translation, but a transformation when the translator selects an antonym and combines it with a negation element. Antonymic translation as such can be understood in broader and narrower terms, i.e. it may cover instances of  a simple substitution of an element in the ST by its antonymic counterpart (negative or positive) in translation; positive / negative recasting, a translation procedure where the translator modifies the order of the units in the ST in order to conform to the syntactic or idiomatic constraints of the TT; and  narrowing of the scope of negation whereby the original negative sentence is turned into an affirmative one in translation by moving the negation element to a word phrase or an elliptical sentence. The term antonymic translation covers all these three types. Generally, antonymic translation consists not only in the transformation of negative constructions to affirmative or vice versa: an original phraseological unit can be substituted for other expressions with the opposite meaning in a target language or an occasional antonym. The usage of antonymic translation as one of the methods of contextual replacement has been investigated. The main types of this lexical and grammatical transformation are systematized. The attention is focused on the reasons for using antonymic translation.