Contents: introduction 2

CHAPTER II. THE RATIO OF ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN PROVERBS AND SAYINGS
2.1. The ratio of English and Russian proverbs and sayings
Classification of English proverbs and sayings in relation to Russian.
Anglo-American idioms, phraseological units, proverbs and sayings can be easily correlated with familiar parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives). Those. some proverbs and sayings are used as nouns, others as adjectives, for example, green with envy (green with rage). But there are few such proverbs and sayings that would characterize one or another part of speech.
Many proverbs and sayings are easily translated into Russian: seize the bull by horns - take the bull by the horns; others need an explanation, because, on the contrary, they have nothing in common with our Russian expressions, although you can sometimes guess what the English want to say. For example, the most common saying is between the devil and deep blue sea, which in Russian sounds like “between two fires”. In America, the literal "between two fires" sounds like "between the devil and the deep blue sea" - it means the same as "to be between Scylla and Charybdis" and does not require much explanation¹¹.
As you can see, proverbs and sayings can be divided into the following categories:
1. English proverbs and sayings that are fully translated into Russian in the same way, i.e. the English version is fully consistent with the Russian;
2. English proverbs and sayings, which are partially translated in the same way into Russian, i.e. the English version is somewhat different from the Russian;
3. English proverbs and sayings that are completely different in translation into Russian, i.e. The English version does not match the Russian one.
Difficulties in translating phraseological units in general and proverbs in particular.
As already mentioned above, phraseological units are a special type of combinations. Their main feature is "partial or complete discrepancy between the plan of content and the plan of expression, which determines the specifics of phraseology" and, of course, will influence the choice of methods and methods of translation.
In almost any language, several levels of phraseological units are noted, and not all of them are well known, widely used and recorded in dictionaries. Some of them are used only by certain groups of native speakers and are not found in dictionaries. That is why the primary task of a translator is to be able to recognize phraseological units in a text, to distinguish a stable combination from a variable one.
It should also be borne in mind that polysemy and homonymy are characteristic not only of words, but also of phraseological units, that is, one and the same combination can be both stable and free at the same time. For example,
The girl next door- 1. a girl who lives nearby, a neighbor;
2. girl, what a lot
Therefore, the ability to analyze speech functions is another condition for the adequate translation of phraseological units into foreign languages. Sometimes authors use phraseological units in several meanings at once to create figurative or emotional associations or a humorous effect.
There are cases when the translator has to restore phraseological units that have undergone the author's transformation and convey in translation the effect they achieve.
Another inevitable difficulty is the national and cultural differences between similar phraseological units in different languages. Often, coinciding in meaning, phraseological units have a different emotional function or stylistic coloring¹².
Similar problems may arise even when translating phraseological units that have the same source, for example, biblical, ancient or mythological. Such phraseological units will be called international. These include phraseological units that were borrowed from language to language, or arose among different peoples independently of each other due to the commonality of human thinking, the proximity of individual moments of social life, labor activity, production, the development of science and arts.
The translator has to face the greatest difficulties when working with phraseological units based on modern realities. Only a few of them quickly become popular and penetrate into international dictionaries. For example,
Hell's Angels
Field of Wonders - «the Land of Wonders»
Finally, various kinds of historical expressions, or catchphrases, should be mentioned. The difficulty lies in the fact that sometimes they have several correspondences, both in the original language and in the target language. Consider the phrase attributed to O. Cromwell.
«Put your trust in God…and keep your powder dry! »
If there is a military theme in the context, then the expression can be translated literally: “Rely on God and keep and keep gunpowder dry!” But historically, the expression has become very popular in English culture and is often used in everyday situations and does not evoke any historical associations. This is due to the fact that in the mind of a native speaker the meanings of phraseological combinations are fixed in the same way as the meanings of individual words are fixed, and the internal form of phraseological units does not always help to motivate the meaning. Then the Russian folk proverb “Trust in God, but don’t make a mistake yourself” is quite suitable for translation, which to a greater extent conveys the colloquial nature of the original unit. In such cases, it is not so much the phraseological unit itself that is translated, but rather its role in the source text.
Difficulties in translating English proverbs and sayings into Russian
The centuries-old experience of communication between peoples who speak and write different languages ​​shows that a good translator must not only understand the meaning of the translated text, but also master the phraseological richness of the language into which the translation is being carried out.
English has its own laws, Russian has its own. English has its own word order, while Russian has a different one. In an English phrase there can never be two negatives, but in Russian we have just used two of them: "never", "not". The English phrase would literally sound like this: "There can never be two negatives in an English phrase."
The Russian language is flexible, and it allows you to keep the English word order in a phrase, but not always. The English phrase "He was not ready" literally translates as "he was not ready." That word order hurts the ear, and we change it to "He wasn't ready."
Difficulties in translating English proverbs and sayings always arise and have always arisen. And, given all the features of a particular language, it is very difficult to translate what is considered part of the culture of one people into another language.
For example, the English proverb
The pot calls the kettle black (1)
The literal translation of this proverb is:
The pot calls this teapot black (2)
If for the English the meaning of the proverb is clear, then for the Russian people this proverb seems to be something new, so the meaning is not always fully revealed. So, in order for the Russian to understand what the English wanted to say with the proverb, one must look for the Russian equivalent:
Whose cow would moo, but yours would be silent (3)
This option is more understandable and closer to the Russian people. But if you translate it again into English, you get the following:
Anyone's cow may moo, but yours should keep quite (4)
As you can see, the initial version (1) is far from the final one (4).
But here is another example of translation difficulties:
John Lennon once came across a catalog selling firearms. Witty John immediately introduced a woman instead of advertising a gun, and it turned out to be a kind of good love song called Happiness Is A Warn Gun - Happiness is a hot weapon. “When I hold you in mypalm, when I feel my finger on your trigger, I know that nobody can do me any harm…” - when I hold you in my palm, when I feel my finger on your clasp (trigger can be translated and like a "trigger", and like a "clasp"), then I know that no one will do me anything bad ... ". And this song is not about a gun at all, as one B.A. radio station host translated: “Happiness is a warm gun.” Yes, he added on his own: “You see, what a stupid song. For someone, happiness is shooting from a warm pistol ... "¹³.
These are the difficulties that a translator encounters when he translates English proverbs.
So, now, based on the analysis of all the above translation difficulties and the features of phraseological units, we can formulate the basic rules for the translation of phraseological units.
2.2. Practical application of the rules for translating English proverbs and sayings into Russian
Questions are caused primarily by the delimitation of a proverb from an aphorism. A number of researchers believe that the proverb is nothing more than one of the types of aphorism (Tarlanov, Artemyeva, Nikitin). So, in the "Literary Encyclopedic Dictionary" the proverb is defined as a folklore aphorism. S.I. Ozhegov defines a proverb as "a short folk saying with instructive content, a folk aphorism"5. A.G. Artemyeva considers proverbs "aphorisms devoid of authorship"6, and proves this with examples of proverbs, considering them in a diachronic aspect and tracing the process of loss of authorship in proverbs. In turn, the famous paremiologist Archer Taylor, on the contrary, singles out aphorism as one of the types of proverbs. He divides proverbs into literary and folk and considers an aphorism as a literary proverb (literary proverb). Sometimes proverbs and aphorisms are combined under the general name of aphorism with its further division into folk aphorism (proverbs and sayings) and book aphorism (gnomes, maxims, apothegms, maxims). There is no doubt that these two types of stable phrases have a number of parameters that bring the phenomena under consideration closer in synchrony¹⁴. The following general features of proverbs and aphorisms are distinguished: in content - philosophical depth, didacticism, claim to truth; in form - brevity, completeness, structured in the form of a sentence; by function - auto-semantics, citations, wide usage. The above general characteristics allow some aphorisms to adapt in the popular mind and become part of the folklore picture of the world, that is, move into the category of proverbs. At the same time, we are of the opinion that the transition of aphorisms into proverbs is not direct, but indirect, through popular expressions. Despite the above common features of proverbs and aphorisms, there are very significant differences between these types of set phrases. The aphorism knows the historical environment in which it arose, the personality, worldview of the author. The proverb was orally expressed by an unknown person, it is not known when, and, having lost its owner, it was modified, folklorized. It is with the category of the author that the differences between proverbial and aphoristic authority, the general function of edification, are associated. Aphorism belongs to the literary form of the existence of the language, which implies a number of features. So, for example, aphorisms are transmitted mainly in writing, while a proverb is an element of oral folk art. To facilitate oral reproduction and listening, proverbs are dressed in a simpler syntactic form and are most often rhythmically organized (Safe bind, safe find). Aphorisms in most cases appear in prosaic form and are clothed in more complex syntactic constructions (An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. Niels Bohr). But their syntactic complexity is natural, since aphorisms contain deep philosophical generalizations, and does not interfere with their perception, since the reader has the opportunity to think about the statement, fixed in writing¹⁵.
1. The optimal translation solution, of course, is the search for an identical phraseological unit. However, it should be recognized that the number of such correspondences in English and Russian is extremely limited.
2. In the absence of direct correspondences, the phraseological unit used in the original language can be translated using a similar phraseological unit, although it will be built on a different verbal-figurative basis. It should also be borne in mind that the stylistic or emotional coloring does not always coincide. In this case, interchange is not possible.
3. Tracing, or word-for-word translation, is sometimes acceptable, although this method is not always effective. It is interesting that sometimes translators manage to introduce a new phraseological unit into the target language and even culture. Most often, this path is applicable to phraseological units that have biblical, ancient or mythological sources.
4. When translating texts on cultural and historical topics, tracing is used along with an explanation in the shortest possible form. This type of translation is called double, or parallel.
5. If there are no phraseological units in the target language that are more or less equivalent to the original phraseological unit, you need to look for words that correspond in meaning and coloring, the so-called one-word partial equivalents of phraseological units.
When translating phraseological units from one language to another, it is recommended to use the most complete explanatory phraseological bilingual dictionaries published in Russia
Practical application of the rules for translating English proverbs and sayings into Russian
Next, I tried to apply all the knowledge I acquired in the course of working on this coursework through a detailed analysis, rethinking and, finally, translation of English proverbs and sayings into Russian.
1. You cannot eat your cake and have it . - You cannot eat a cake and have it at the same time ( literal translation ).
You can't eat one pie twice ( Russian proverb ).