Discursive Words and Particles in the Author’s Translation

The article is devoted to the study of discursive words based on the comparative analysis of the English text of V. Nabokov's novel “Lolita“ and its translation into Russian provided by the author himself. This text is of particular interest for us since Nabokov was a native speaker of both languages. This fact enables us to consider the difference in the usage of discursive words and particles, in Russian and English and the conditions for their use in either language, since in Russian there are discursive units that have no correspondences in the English text, and the translator himself often includes new discursive words.

We conducted a comprehensive comparative analysis of the text of V. Nabokov's novel “Lolita“ and the author's translation into Russian, which resulted in a list of discursive units that appeared in Russian translation of “Lolita“ while having no equivalents in the English text. The analysis of the English context, which forced Nabokov to introduce a discursive unit into the Russian translation, enabled us to make some conclusions about the semantics of Russian discursive units and about Russian language culture.