Strategies for rendering phraseological and para-phraseological units in Russian poetic translations of R. Kipling (based on the poem “If–”)

Abstract

The article investigates the strategies used to render phraseological units (PUs) in Russian translations of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If–”. The study aims to establish correlations between the types of PUs in the source text and the strategies employed to translate them into Russian. The content of the article comprises an analysis of three typological groups of PUs in the original text (conventional units, authorial modifications of conventional units, and occasional phraseologized collocations) and five translation strategies used in versions by M. Lozinsky and S. Marshak: descriptive paraphrase, occasional equivalent, phraseological analogue, compensation, and structural-semantic equivalent. The scientific novelty of the study lies in establishing, for the first time on the material of the specified poem, a correlation between the typological features of the source PUs and the translator’s strategic choice, while also identifying the decisive factor governing this choice – the rhythmic structure of the poetic text. The research findings indicate that descriptive paraphrase serves as the dominant translation strategy in the analyzed texts (accounting for 50% of instances), whereas occasional equivalents (18%), compensation (10%), phraseological analogues (10%), structural-semantic equivalents (7%), and other strategies (5%) are employed considerably less frequently.