AUTHOR – TEXT – TRANSLATOR – EDITOR – TEXT – READER: TO PROBLEMS OF SINGLE READING

Abstract

In the European integration processes, which covered all spheres of Ukrainian society life, an important place belongs to intercultural communication, one of the oldest manifestations of which is the exchange of texts through translation. It involves readers of fiction who form an opinion not only about the actual problems raised by the author, about his level of giftedness, and originality, but also about the quality of the translated text, which is the result of the translator’s creativity and the proofreader’s work. As practice shows, not always the text that reaches the Ukrainian reader satisfies his/her informational and cultural tastes and doesn’t cause the reader’s discomfort with language design. More and more often, there are texts that under certain logic violate the spelling rules. An example is the translation of a novel by the Slovenian novelist Drago Jančar, in which one can notice deviations in the direct speech of someone else’s discourse. The article is a reader’s philological reflection and research, designed to find out if these are punctuation errors or a graphic stylistic technique. Using the continuous sampling method the author compiled a bank of syntactic constructions with a direct speech in which the current punctuation rules are violated for author’s words highlighting and reporting them literally. All factors that affect the choice of punctuation marks in sentences with direct speech were taken into account: the place the author’s words concerning the direct speech, the type of sentence in a foreign language according to the communicative purpose, features of the syntactic structure of the author’s words (the number of predicates in them and their orientation to the previous/next or one part of the direct languages), the method of transmitting someone else’s speech: dialogic or linear. As the analysis of sentences with the direct speech norms violations shows, it is difficult for the reader to understand the purpose of such a graphic-stylistic technique: the content is not expressed and rather becomes complicated. No special aesthetic and artistic pictures are created either since no special emotional states which arise when reading such sentences or which would convey such heroes’ states were detected. We can only tell about reader irritation due to punctuation carelessness. In addition, the predominance of this negligence in the first three chapters suggests that the corrector of this novel part allowed a punctuation error, and was not guided by stylistic needs.