Creating meanings: discourse strategies markers and ways of rendering them in the translations of A. Chekhov’s plays “Three sisters” and “The Seagull”

Abstract

A. Chekhov’s plays “Three sisters” and “The Seagull” have a linguistic particularity. The way the characters speak resembles the way educated people of the epoch spoke in life. The characters’ vivid and natural speech creates spoken stylistic coloring of the text. Spoken Russian discourse has a wide range of pragmatic means that specify the discourse strategies of speakers. In Russian the speaker often presupposes some part of the information without explicitly articulating it by lexically determined means, and in this way one marks his or her actual discourse strategy. By using non-descriptive lexis one can also form implicit value judgements or mark involvement in actions. Such lexical means are usually language-specific, which makes their translation really intricate. It results in discrepancies between the original text and its translations. This fact does not undermine the translator’s mission; it just highlights the difference in discourse structuring patterns that exist in different languages.