PECULIARITIES OF CONVEYING THE STRUCTURAL AND SEMANTIC SPECIFICITY OF JAPANESE ONOMATOPOEIA IN TRANSLATION OF TEXTS OF ADVERTISING CHARACTER

Abstract

It historically happened that onomatopoeia of the Japanese language is the most commonly
used lexical group for writing advertisement texts. Onomatopoeic words, firstly, affect the background knowledge of a Japanese consumer at the phonetic level and touch their consciousness as effective as possible, and, secondly, they meet the main tasks of advertising: to formulate clearly and concisely, to accentuate, and to cause the desired reaction. Advertising texts belong to communicatively meaningful stylistic subsystems of any language and, therefore, play a significant role in the study of the most used elements of a certain lexical stratum. This article deals with the problem of translation of onomatopoeia, which is used in the Japanese texts of advertising character, as one of the most informative types of linguistic material of colloquial and everyday style. The main factors governing the choice of English counterparts of the Japanese onomatopoeia employed in advertising for conveying the specificity of the national and cultural semantics which this vocabulary possesses have been considered. Using the examples of gitaigo and giongo onomatopoeia collected on the basis of contemporary Japanese advertising texts, an attempt has been made to investigate the most accurate ways of translation of an onomatopoeic word as a bright national and cultural semantic unit of the Japanese language. Having analyzed the onomatopoeic words of the chosen advertisements, we have established that the stylization as gitaigo causes a translator the greatest difficulty. The repetitive morphemes, of which these onomatopoeias are composed, most often can be translated descriptively only, in the way which is most appropriate in a given context, or in the way of semantic transformation.