AUTHOR’S NEOLOGISMS IN GEORGE ORWELL’S DYSTOPIA “1984”: PRAGMATICS OF THE TRANSLATIONS

Abstract

Literary pragmatics has been a relatively new field of study on the crossroads of literature and philology. It usually deals with the realm of implicit meaning, either consciously hidden by the author or found by a zealous reader. It has been proven that stylistic devices provide a fuller understanding of literary settings, characters, they also convey author’s attitude to character traits. In this paper, the main objective of the research is to compare two Ukrainian versions of dystopia “1984” by George Orwell in terms of translation of neologisms. All the author’s neologisms in the novel are subdivided into 4 categories according to their characteristic features and/or role in the text. Each category is analysed in terms of prevailing methods of translation, namely transliteration, verbal translation, calquing and transcreation on the basis of componential analyses. The two distinctive methods that do not overlap are the usage of foreign inclusions (basically words or word combinations from the original text) with further translation-explanation (V. Stelmakh) and translation by omission and compensation with one’s own examples (B. Nosenok). These methods do either add to the implicit layer of information the reader gets or deprive them of it. Among the most distinctive differences between the ways of handling neologisms one should single out the usage of different graphic stylistic devices (writing text in italics, capitalization, use of brackets, and quotation marks). It has been proven that the excessive use of capitalization can do harm to the pragmatic meaning behind neologisms as it so-to-speak equalises different categories of neologisms. Another important thing is the fact that choosing a particular way to handle the key concepts and quotes from the original text can lead to fundamental changes in the reader’s perception of the dystopia and its principal ideas.