Phraseological units in Turkish media: translation problems in the context of evaluativeness

Abstract

The article examines phraseological units used in political texts of contemporary Turkish media. Following V.V. Vinogradov’s classification, phraseological fusions and unities are selected for analysis from the point of view of their initial and contextual evaluativeness in order to achieve adequate translation in the Turkish–Russian language pair. The study employs descriptive-comparative, componential and contextual analysis. The results show that the initial evaluativeness of a phraseological unit in a political context may be preserved or reversed; the same phraseological unit may have evaluatively opposite contextual variants. The semantics recorded in phraseological dictionaries or in the explanations of the Turkish Language Association may be transformed in accordance with the political context. Changes in the idiom’s composition do not significantly affect its evaluativeness or semantics, although they can increase expressiveness or emphasize particular semantic nuances. A number of Turkish phraseological units actively used in the media are not included in phraseological dictionaries, which likely indicates their relatively recent origin. Some phraseological units enter political discourse from other spheres, including scientific and sports discourse. When translating phraseological fusions and unities in media context, it is necessary to take into account their stylistic affiliation, expressiveness and emotional connotation. For this reason, selecting an equivalent in the target language is not always the best solution. For some idioms that are difficult for the target audience to perceive, calquing is impossible, and the translator must choose a syntactically different variant based on the semantics of the original idiom.

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