Ablativus Absolutus: Ways of Translation into Russian in the First Half of the 18th Century
Abstract
Studying the 18th century Russian translations and comparing them with their sources makes it possible to find some peculiar features of the Russian language of the period in question, as well as to consider what means the translators used to convey the content of the translated text. For example, ablative absolute, being a clause (participial, substantival or adjectival), usually expresses adverbial modifiers. There is no correspondence to this clause type in Russian syntax, so it is necessarily replaced when translating texts into Russian. In this article we analyze the ways of translating the ablative absolute clause into Russian using the data from the articles by T. S. Bayer published in the collection of “Commentaries of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences” (translated by I. G. Ilyinsky and K. A. Kondratovich), as well M. V. Lomonosov’s Latin-Russian authorized translations (1749–1757).
When compared with the theoretical description of ablative absolute clause in V. I. Lebedev’s grammar which suggested three ways of translating it into Russian, the aforementioned examples from the selected authors show that the translators were well aware of the brevity of the Latin clause and in search for its Russian counterpart discovered the hidden resources of their mother tongue; as a result, several different ways of transformation of the ablative absolute clause can be distinguished.
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