О проблеме эквивалентности перевода фразеологических единиц: на примере русско-нидерландского фразеологического словаря

Translating Phraseological Units: on the Problem of Equivalence in the Russian-Dutch Phraseological Dictionary

Because of their idiomatic character, phraseological expressions belong to the linguistic units that are the most difficult to understand for foreign speakers. Concomitantly, an adequate rendering of phraseological units, especially figurative ones, into another language can often be quite problematic. An explanation for this is the fact that many of them have an explicit national or culture-specific character. While translating phraseological units, it is important to take into account the peculiarities of the context in which they are used. The polysemy and stylistic diversity of phraseological units complicates their translation into other languages.
This paper is based on the authors’ experience with compiling the first Russian-Dutch phraseological dictionary, which they have just prepared for print. Elements of both intralingual and interlingual translation were used in the entries of the dictionary: on the one hand, explanations are given in Russian through the use of synonymic and antonymic phraseological expressions; on the other hand, each phraseological unit is provided with an equivalent phraseological or lexical unit in Dutch - which constituted the main goal of the volume. The theoretical premises and practical conclusions connected with work on the dictionary are founded upon the following questions: a) What is specific for the translation of idioms whose meaning cannot be deduced from their components compared to the translation of phraseological "unities" which are clearly based on the meaning of the words that constitute them?; b) Which implications does the universal interlingual character of phraseological unities (structural-typological correspondences) have for the practice of translation?; c) Which solutions can be found to the problem of translating stylistic and evaluative or emotional aspects of a phraseological expression?; d) Which translation shifts can be observed in the Dutch renderings of Russian phrase units?
While compiling the Russian-Dutch phraseological dictionary, the authors adhered to an understanding of the phraseological expression in the strict sense of the term. In their opinion, the main characteristics of phraseologisms are: a) their belonging to nominative linguistic units, their equivalence to words with a nominative (i.e. naming) function; b) the idiomatic character of their meaning, i.e. the impossibility of deducing the general meaning of the expression from the sum of their individual components; c) their composite structure, containing at least two components; d) their collocational character, i.e. their ability to be reproduced in language in a "ready-made" form.