Collocations in A. P. Chekhov’s play “The Seagull” and ways of their translation into English

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to identify the main trends in the translation from Russian into English of the collocations used by A. P. Chekhov in his play “The Seagull”. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that this is the first comparative study of three translations of the play (published between 1912 and 2015), which allows us to consider the main ways of translating the above expressions and identify possible translation problems. In the course of the study, it was found that the term “collocation” does not have a single interpretation in modern linguistics, which leads to the difficulty of determining which linguistic units relate to this concept. The author identified 17 examples of A. P. Chekhov’s use of collocations of three types: traditional, occasional and ethno-cultural, and carried out a comparative analysis of their transmission into English. The translation of occasional collocations is the most difficult, and in the last versions of the translation of this play, the translator decided not to transmit these expressions in order to avoid incorrect meaning of the statement.