Olena Yuzhakova

Odessa National Academy for Food Technologies

THE TRANSLATION OF RUSSIAN ADJECTIVES WITH THE COMPONENTS -ПОДОБНЫЙ, -ВИДНЫЙ AND -OБРАЗНЫЙ INTO UKRAINIAN

 © Yuzhakova O. I., 2014

The articles aims at revealing seme peculiarities of the Russian composite adjectives with the basic components -подобный, -видный and -образный and their equivalents among Ukrainian adjectives united by the seme of affinity. For this purpose the adjectives are arranged in groups with the number of variants established in each of them. The articles considers the ways of adjective formation and deals with a number of issues connected with the semantic structure of Ukrainian and Russian nominations.

Keywords: Ukrainian language, Russian language, translation, variant, composite adjective, seme, seme structure, term unit.

The problem of translating Russian compound adjectives with the basic components -подобный, -видный and -образный into the Ukrainian language has been addressed many times in scientific publications. However, certain issues connected with the faithfulness of translation from one language into the other remain controversial. Firstly, the number of Ukrainian derivatives with the integral seme of affinity that are equivalent to Russian units is to be established. Secondly, ways of forming Ukrainian terms are to be traced. Thirdly, the results obtained by the author in her previous article that analyses Russian compound adjectives are to be contrasted with the results of this research taking into account the semantic analysis of Ukrainian derivatives with various suffixes and basic components in case of compounds.

Addressing the first issue, the author grouped about 900 Ukrainian derivatives with various suffixes and suffixoids (basic components of compounds) into separate micro-groups and established their quantity (approximiately 330 units). Besides, each group contains a different number of adjectives, from one to ten units: for instance, dictionaries and research works register five Ukrainian nominations – кристалічний, кристалуватий, кристалистий, кристалоподібний and кристаловидний as equivalents of the Russian units кристалловидный/кристаллообразный/кристаллоподобный. Furthermore, the article reveals both compound-syntactic units and affixal units among Ukrainian units. Compound-syntactic variation is peculiar to Russian compound adjectives as other units are beyond the scope of this research.

As to the second issue, the author establishes ways of formation of Ukrainian units. Therefore, the number of Ukrainian compound adjectives with the basic components -подібний and -видний formed by compounding is 597 units (66,7 %). The rest of nominations (300 units – 43,3 %) are formed by other ways, mostly suffixation, the most productive suffixes being -уват- (184 units – 20,6 %), -аст- (57 nominations – 6,4 %) and -ист- (25 nominations – 2,8 %). Certainly, Russian compound adjectives as well as Ukrainian ones are formed by means of compounding.

Comparing the results of research presented in articles on translation of the above mentioned adjectives, which are related to the third issue, it should be noted that the phenomenon of semantic divergence is characteristic of Ukrainian and Russian nominations. But whereas in the Russian language the variants of one group may differ depending on the presence of emotional component (16 %), in Ukrainian adjectives are classified according to different intensity degrees of manifestation of the feature designated by the forming stem, and these degrees are worth specifying.

The problem lies in different attitudes of scholars towards this disputable issue because, for instance, some researchers (L. Sydorenko) consider it necessary to attach the meaning of incomplete action, i. e. “a small degree of feature manifestation”, to the suffix -уват-, and the meaning of “a larger degree of feature manifestation” to the suffix -аст-. However, other researchers single out the seme of “a large amount of what is indicated by the forming stem” in the semantic structure of the suffix -уват- (A. Karpilovska) and interpret the meaning of the suffix -аст- as one including a seme of excess (V. Horpynych). As a result, there may be confusion, for example are “голчастий гонок” and “голкуватий гонок” nominations of different parts of a mechanism or are they used to denote the same part?

All this leads us to the need for compiling dictionaries whose entries contain information on the semantic structure of headwords, as it has been done in the «English-Ukrainian-English Dictionary of Scientific Language (Physics and Related Science)» (2010) by O. Kocherha and E. Meinarovych.