RENDERING LINGUISTIC REPRESENTATION OF DEATH IMAGE IN CLASSICAL HORROR FICTION

The article sheds light upon the problem of rendering English horror literature genre peculiarities into Ukrainian within the scope of translation studies not only in Europe but all over the world. The investigated genre has been marginal towards the other literature genres as it has been considered the one to have no aesthetic effect on the reader. Horror literature as an object of translational studies has been declared only during the last decades. Most of the studies are aimed at exploring horror literature relevantly by studying its roots, especially the gothic novel. The issue of reproducing the lexical peculiarities of classical horror literature is of great importance as they form the basis of the genre itself. The aim of the present paper is to reveal the most frequently used ways of depicting DEATH in classical examples of horror fiction by B. Stoker’s novel “Dracula”, D. Stoker’s novel “Dracula. The Un-Dead” and M. Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus” and determine the efficient translation strategies of rendering them into Ukrainian. Thus, the primary objective within the research framework is to disclose the language representation of main cognethemes in depicting DEATH in the ST and to find out translation techniques applied to reproducing them in the TT. There is still a certain mistrust concerning the power of literature to deliver socially adequate information related to death. The analysis of rendering language representation of DEATH cognethemes in classical horror literature paves the way to applying the singled-out results to translating modern horror fiction. The current investigation attempts to remedy the huge potential of fiction to provide a distinctive explanation of death as inevitable human reality. The methodology of the paper is multifaceted and involves general scientific, philological and translational methods of analysis. Among linguistic and translation-specific methods are comparative- translational, contrastive, definitive, contextual, linguistic and stylistic, descriptive and method of quantitative calculations. Horror fiction is determined by its genre-forming register, therefore maintaining lexical stylistic devices is prioritized. Emotionally colored lexemes, epithets, lexical repetitions are the key devices used by B. Stoker, D. Stoker and M. Shelley in the process of describing death. Stylistic equivalent is the prevailing translation technique while rendering stylistic devices in the horror genre, while stylistic weakening and stylistic intensification that result in domestication play crucial roles in bridging the emotional intention of a source text. The results of the research show the domination of the stylistic equivalent in the translator’s repertoire witnesses the translator’s desire to go deep into the plot and preserve the genre forming lexemes. According to the quantitative calculations of the corpora selected – language representation of the concept DEATH has been rendered as follows – stylistic weakening prevails in 33,3 %, in 20,4 % dominates stylistic emphasis, that shows the translator’s willingness to be as close to the source text as possible and the biggest percentage is stylistic equivalent – 46,3 %, proving that the translator does his/ her best to be equivalently close to the original and doesn’t want to be an illegal co-author of the original.