Rendering the characteristic ‘злой’ (evil; angry) into German (by the example of translations of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s prose)

The aim of the study is to determine the main semantic differences between the Russian adjectives ‘злой’ (evil; angry) and ‘злобный’ (spiteful; malicious) and their most frequent translation equivalents in the German language. The research material is limited to 6 translations into German of the stories “Notes from the House of the Dead” and “Notes from Underground” by F. M. Dostoevsky (3 translations of each story). The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that the work is the first to examine the influence of the internal semantic structure of the Russian lexemes ‘злой’ and ‘злобный’ on the choice of translation correspondences in the German language. As a result of the study, it is shown that in the German language, there is a wide variety of translation options for the Russian adjectives ‘злой’ and ‘злобный’, among which we can distinguish nuclear lexical units that are almost complete semantic correspondences and such units that have semantic features allowing them to be used only in certain contexts: if the characteristic ‘злой’ refers to a person and to the description of relationships between people.