Ways of translating infinitive sentences

Abstract

Modern translation studies are characterized by increased attention to research on grammatical aspects of translation activity. Due to the general interest of modern linguistics to the study of semantic and functional aspects of grammatical phenomena, the problem of non-finite verb forms, including the infinitive, attracts growing attention of researchers in the sphere of linguistics. This article aims at identifying the problem of translating the infinitive sentences into English on the example of the the original novels “Recreations” («Рекреації») and “The Moscoviad” («Московіада») by Yuri Andrukhovych and their translation into English by Mark Pavlyshyn and Vitaly Chernetsky, respectively. The object of the study is infinitive sentences. The subject of the research is the ways of translating infinitive sentences. The goal of this work is to study the methods and means of translating the infinitive sentences from Ukrainian into English. The ways of translating the infinitive sentences are mostly determined by its form and its syntactical function. In the process of rendering Ukrainian infinitive sentences in English, translators use translation transformations, the most common of which is grammatical transformation of sentence type replacement, as the original one-member sentence is replaced by the target two-member sentence. Other transformations include part-of-speech substitution, transposition, omission, addition, and paraphrasing. Thus, our study has demonstrated that the most frequent translation of Ukrainian infinitive sentences of all types is by means of an English two-member sentence with the use of modal words in the structure.