COLOUR TERM RED BASED ON THE JOHN FOWLES’ WORKS

Abstract

The article is devoted to the research of the microfield red based on the John Fowles’ English-language works and their translations into Ukrainian, as well as to the establishing of the peculiarities of its functioning in his works.

During research the colour term red was found in these works; the composition and structure of the lexico-semantic variants of this microfield were determined; the peculiarities of translation of studied colour term components into Ukrainian were analyzed.

It is found that in the original text and in the text translation, the red/chervonyy microfield is the largest – 24% of the total number of units with the colour component in the original text and 23.5% of the total number of units with the colour component in the text translation. The selected units with the colour term component are mostly adjectives.

The studied microfield contains 39 examples of the colour term usage and 6 shades in English (carmine, ruddy, scarlet, russet, purple, pink) and 36 examples of the colour term usage and 7 shades in Ukrainian (karminovyi, bahrianyi, chervoniastyi, yaskravo-chervonyi, rudyi, ruduvatyi, rozhevyi).

Identification of a colour component in one or both languages made it possible to distinguish the following three categories of colour verbal images: full equivalents (She must have been reading all the time; he saw the straw hat with the red sash on the grass behind her as she came toward them, book still in hand // ‘Mabut, ves chas chytala, a teper, zalyshyvshy na travi svoho solomianoho kapeliushka z chervonoiu strichkoiu, pidiishla do nykh, vse shche trymaiuchy v rutsi knyzhku’); partial equivalents (If the Mouse was odd, this creature was preposterous. She was even smaller, very thin, a slightly pinched face under a mop of frizzed-out hair that had been reddened with henna // ‘Yakshcho Mysha zdavalasia chudernatskoiu postattiu, to tse stvorinnia malo prosto bezghluzdyi vyhliad. Shche nyzhcha, khudiucha, z vuzkym oblychchiam, nad yakym styrchyt kopytsia rudykh vid khny kucherykiv’); non-equivalent colour terms: (I do think this is the most terrible red herring, sergeant. // ‘Ya pevna – vy vzialy khybnyi slid’).