Linguistic Representation of Power Relations in Margaret Atwood’s «The Handmaid’s Tale»: A Comparative Analysis of the Ukrainian and Slovak Translations

This study analyzes the linguistic representation of power relations in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel «The Handmaid’s Tale» and their transmission in Ukrainian and Slovak translations. Power is viewed as a multifaceted construct expressed through linguistic choices denoting social stratification, institutional authority, subjugation, limitation, obedience, and opposition. Examining power relations in a literary text is relevant to translation studies, as their transmission requires preserving not only factual content but also pragmatic and ideological implications. The study identifies the main linguistic strategies used to represent power relations in the source text and compares their reproduction in the Ukrainian and Slovak translations. The corpus comprises selected examples from the source and target language texts. The methodology combines contextual and linguostylistic analyses with comparative and descriptive methods, focusing on lexico-grammatical and pragmatic means of representing authority, control, and constrained agency. The results show that power relations in The Handmaid’s Tale are represented through institutionalized forms of address and naming, evaluative vocabulary, euphemisms, negative modality, passive structures, commands, religious and biblical language, and devices of personal evaluation. Both translations largely preserve the semantic, pragmatic, and ideological functions of the original while employing language-specific translation transformations. The Ukrainian version uses transposition, contextual substitution, and structural changes, whereas the Slovak version more frequently employs paraphrasing and syntactic restructuring. Despite these differences, both translations preserve the representation of institutional control and the conflict between assigned social roles and individual autonomy. Thus, translating power relations involves not only reproducing source-text structures but also their contextual -gramma uages.