Heroes’ description in horror literature: problems of translation

Abstract

The article studies the problem of hero portrait characteristics rendering in horror literature genre and emphasizes the problems which translators face while translating the above mentioned genre characteristic. Horror literature genre is characterized by cliché heroes, which is determined by its gothic origin. Certain formulae-heroes most vividly express the mysterious atmosphere of horror. The article analyses the stock nouns, which describe the main types of heroes in horror literature genre. The portrait descriptions of villain, heroine and lesser character are studied from the translation perspective of rendering into Ukrainian. The villain’s appearance is taken into consideration as an important genre component from which the plot composition depends. Horror genre heroes are described to be mysterious, dangerous, disgusting what enables to create the set of characters relevant to the studied literature.
The paper discusses the translation of three main types of horror genre heroes and states that the most typical problems which translators overcome in rendering the description of villain and heroine. It states, that translators should keep to a strategy of full rendering of all portrait characteristics to translate the detalization and expressiveness in portraying. The key factor in the process of heroes’ description translation is to save the forecasting information, which is considered to be factual and genre-determined. Elimination is considered to be
unsuitable, because such translation technique destroys the content of sourcetext and leads to translation failures. Generalization or partial elimination is possible to be used while rendering the portrait of lesser characters, because they are not considered to be genre-determined. Heroes of horror genre are
portrayed with the help of lexical and linguostylistic means which are to be properly rendered into the target text. Stylistic correspondence, stylistic emphasis and stylistic elimination are
considered to be the most frequently used translation techniques to render the heroes’ descriptions of horror literature genre in translation