PUBLICISTIC AND NEWSPAPER STYLE TEXTS AND WAYS OF THEIR TRANSLATION
Several characteristic features pertaining to the belles-lettres style texts are also observed in publicistic substyle works, which are mostly presented by articles on different subjects (social, political, economic, etc.) as well as in essays. The latter, though close to sketches or even to short stories by their composition, have distinctly different features of their own. The main of these are as follows: 1) brevity of expression; 2) the use of personal (author's) comment; 3) careful paragraphing; 4) strong logical and emotional argumentation; 5) extensive use of comparison and similes, epithets, sustained metaphors, etc.1
Like the belles-lettres texts the publicistic and newspaper texts can also be faithfully translated only by way of reaching equivalence
1 See: I.R. Galperin. Stylistics. Moscow: Vyssaja Skola 1971, p. 287.
in the target language at the denotative, structural, stylistic and pragmatic levels of the source language text. Hence, when translating the excerpt of S.Leacock's brillaint essay Oxford as I See It below, care should be taken to select in the target language such kind of equivalents, which perform the same stylistic and pragmatic functions as in the source language texts. The student will certainly find no great difficulties in choosing equivalent structural forms of simple extended or composite sentences used by Leacock to create the necessary dynamism in the text of his essay. Certainly, the greatest difficulty will be found in selecting equivalents for some contextual meanings and functions of lexical and lexico-grammatical units, which help create humorous or ironic effect upon the reader and thus form the pragmatic orientation of the excerpt from this essay. Hence, the task will be to choose in Ukrainian not only lexico-grammatical and stylistic substitutions for some language signs and their meanings, but also some prosodic (intonation and stress) means to achieve the necessary fidelity of translation in the target language.
The clue to the pragmatic orientation of the excerpt is partly indicated by the author in the concluding words of the introductory paragraph where he promises to submit «the place (i.e. Oxford University) to a searching scrutiny.» The realization of this «scrutiny» on the forthcoming pages is performed, in fact, with great skill, which the translator will have to recreate correspondingly in Ukrainian as well.
The essay as a literary work aims at a psychological influence on the reader or listener in order to convince him of the reality and authenticity of the described topic/subject. This is achieved, as can be seen from the excerpt of S.Leacock's brilliant essay Oxford as I See It below, by means of the logical and emotional argumentation of the author's point of view, by the use of coherent logical syntactic structures and by often reference to historical events or prominent personalities, etc. Cf. «When I add to this that I had already visited Oxford in 1907 and spent a Sunday at All Souls with Colonel L.S. Amery1, it will be seen at once that my views on Oxford are based upon observations extending overfourteen years.»
All peculiar stylistic features of the essay including the author's individual style have to be faithfully reflected in the translation of each single sentence.
Stylistically close to the style of essays are many newspaper
1 L.S. Amery - a member of Parliament, politician and Oxford university graduate.
and journal/magazine articles, dealing with social, political, economic and other subjects. They are aimed at acquainting the reader with some important or disputable problems of various social, political or economic aspects of life. The text of such articles is carefully paragraphed, as can be seen below, too; also it mostly consists of coherent sentences, which can not be omitted without mining the logical structure or sense of the paragraph, which it is the part of. This can be especially observed in the excerpt of the article on economy below. Other articles may contain elements of belles-letters style with emotionally coloured elements and several stylistic devices, as shown in the article on post-Chomobyl' life.
The bulk of newspaper space, however, occupy shorter and longer news items containing generally common lexical material and syntactic structures (cliches) having corresponding equivalents in the target language, and usually presenting no great difficulty for beginning translators.
The newspaper article on Chornobyl' is more like a belles-lettres short story with a vivid description of the situation in which many Ukrainians found themselves after several years of the world's most horrible technological disaster. The Ukrainian version of the articles, naturally, must also faithfully express the high literary qualities of the source language text.
All other Ukrainian articles that follow represent scientific (history) and didactic style texts, which have mostly lexico-grammatical and syntactic/or stylistic equivalents in English as well. Consequently, they can not present any difficulties in translating or interpreting them even in viva voce.