Use of Phraseological Units in Coronavirus Articles on the Basis of English Mass Media

The article deals with functioning of phraseological units in the mass media observing articles about coronavirus, as well as the peculiarities of the translation of the phraseological units into Ukrainian. It is well-known that mass media is a center of spreading and informing the news all over the world about urgent issues, changes, deterioration or improvement of the situation regarding COVID-19. Language, which is very susceptible to the world changes, immediately responds to changes in the society, and reflects current events, fixing them at the lexical level. Particular attention should be paid to the phraseological level. This is due to the fact that phraseological units accumulate specific information about everyday life and imaginable situations, objects, and relationships, and therefore become an excellent tool for conceptualizing reality. This performs the function of symbolic replacement not only of the object of the figurative nomination itself, but also of the speaker’s attitude to it. The Coronavirus discourse determines this choice by pragma-linguistic task facing the subject of the speech ‒ the need to adapt to pandemic, which means to simulate typical situations and to form a corresponding linguistic paremic space. In journalism there are a lot of methods that attract the attention of their readers. Phraseological units add interest and uniqueness to each story in news articles, thereby adapting it for readers. Phraseological units make it easier to perceive new, complex, and possibly terrifying information in articles that cover the topic of COVID-19. That’s the reason why phraseological units are quite common in the mass media. In this research, the classification for periodicals was analyzed. According to Konovets, classification was based on their pragmatic functions in journalistic texts and their degree of idiomatic sense and divided into functional and figurative phraseological units. A number of advantages of using phraseology explains their frequent use in the modern periodicals. But journalistic text as a platform for phraseology is quite an unexplored domain and few scientific works testify this fact. In the course of translating phraseological units, the translator must take into consideration that the most significant existing task is to convey the meaning and idea of the source language. On the basis of coronavirus articles, it became obvious how important it is for the translator to understand what kind of phraseological units need to be interpreted in the target language. If possible, the interpreter conveys all the important components of the phraseological unit. A skilled interpreter, throughout the translation process, uses several types of translation. The type of translation affects the meaning and emphasizes the differences between two languages.