EQUIVALENCY AS THE BASIC CRITERIA FOR TRANSLATION QUALITY

Importance of the problems stated in the paper is caused by variety of approaches in Russian and foreign translation theory to grade translations, and by the aspiration to allocate the most comprehensible in applied aspect criteria for high quality translation, relying on the key concepts of translation theory, in particular on equivalency. The basic purpose of paper is to analyze the existing translation approaches to defining the term “equivalency” and to distinguish the most relevant positions for achieving high-quality translation in the aspect of equivalency. The paper presents linguistic and communicative approaches to the theory of the equivalency, which allow defining the degree of similarity between the original and translation texts taking into account a pragmatic aim. Special attention is given to the analysis of the basics of equivalency theory in works of Russian and foreign linguists. Besides linguistic definition of translation equivalency and distinguishing its levels by comparing original and translation text, declared in works of V.N. Komissarov and J. Catford, the research focuses on the communicative theory and pragmatics of O. Kade, J. House. Special attention in the paper is given to the basics of the communicative equivalency theory by Z.D. Lvovskaya. The approach declares priority of achieving such a level of communicative equivalency which allows to record similarity/equivalency of not only linguistic but also cultural images of the interlocutors.

Cases of achieving optimal translation equivalency in English, German and Russian languages are analyzed in practical examples. Results of the analysis show that statements of communicative equivalency theory are a substantial contribution to the theory of linguistic levels of equivalency and enlarge opportunities in achieving high-quality translation in regard to various cultural images of the world. The results of analyzing practical cases lead to the supposition that these theoretical statements are important for practical translation and for didactics in evaluating professional written translation.