Translation of Non-Equivalent Idioms (using English and Russian examples)

Abstract

The author analyses possibilities of translating idioms that do not have corresponding equivalents in the target language. In addition to existing methods described in literature, he proposes translation by means of compensation within a narrow context. The substitute idiom should be chosen from the same phraseosemantic field, and thus, both semantic link to the original text and important stylistic level typical of idioms are preserved in the target text. The theory is demonstrated by examples of translation from English into Russian and vice versa.