TRANSLINGUALISM TRANSLATED: APPROACHES TO RENDERING JAMES JOYCE’S LINGUAL EXPERIMENTS (AS BASED ON THE UKRAINIAN EDITION OF THE NOVEL ULYSSES TRANSLATED BY O. TEREKH AND O. MOKROVOSLKYI)

Abstract

This article seeks to discover approaches to translating literary translingualism, which constitutes an essential component of James Joyce’s artistic method. The study is based on the latest Ukrainian edition of the novel Ulysses translated by Oleksandr Terekh and Oleksandr Mokrovolskyi (2018). Relying on the definition of translingualism as “phenomenon of authors who write in more than one language or at least in a language other than their primary one” (Kellmann, 2000: ix), I suggest that unlike bi- and multilingualism, i.e. co-existence of two and more languages within a literary text, translingualism involves code-mixing rather than code-switching. Following Maria Tymoczko’s basic characteristics of postcolonial writing, I argue that translingualism also manifests itself in the works of the authors with bi- or multilingual background in the form of perturbations in lexis (imported lexical items, unusual collocations, non-standard frequency distributions, variant semantic fields and occasionalisms), unusual syntax and defamiliarized language. The analysis of 125 instances of translingualism demonstrates that homogenization of the translingual narrative is applied in the majority of cases (42%). However, total elimination of the foreign component is considered least desirable for rendering translingual elements. The neutralization tendency is often observed in instances of grammatical interference. The substitution of the ST translingual element with vernacularism or dialectal word is observed in 24% of the analyzed examples. Such strategy is effective for rendering Hiberno-English expressions as the latter function as vernacular in ST. Though the translingual element is also eliminated, the text preserves its stylistic and pragmatic function. Zero translation with a footnote, found in 19% of cases, is successfully used as means of compensation in case of multi- and translingual clusters. Finally, transliteration and loan translation is the least frequent strategy used by the Ukrainian translators of Ulysses (15%). It is particularly effective for rendering Joyce’s occasionalisms.