Concept death in horror literature genre: pecularities of translation

Abstract

The article studies the problem of concept DEATH rendering in horror literature genre and emphasizes the problems which translators face while translating the above mentioned genre characteristic. The topic of death that touches all works of the above mentioned genre occupies a dominant position and is represented with the help of cognithemes, which form the concept. The article states, that the most vivid cognithemes
within the concept DEATH are considered to be animals, which predict death and dead body. In the process of death description authors refer to individual and common tendencies. The analyzed material justifies that bats, rats and dogs symbolize death in
B. Stocker’s «Dracula», rats and large birds in D. Stocker’s and A. Holt’s «Dracula. The Undead», and dogs in M. Shelly’s «Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus». Together with the cognitheme animals, which predict death the concept DEATH has got another cognitheme dead body. The dominant strategy of
describing death is to portray dead body of the main or lesser character, whether antagonist or protagonist. Detalized descriptions of human body, which was damaged physically, are
the key factors of making reader follow the genre. Dead human organs, parts of human body and the body itself as an object that proves death show authors’ individual tendencies in representing death as genre-determined characteristic. Genre-determined lexical units demand from a translator a successful choice of translation technique, with the help of which the target text won’t lose its structural and compositional character. The research shows that 33% of lexical units are not rendered into Ukrainian as a result of stylistic elimination, while 20.4% demonstrate stylistic emphasis, that shows a thorough study of source text by translators and the stylistic correspondence occupies the
dominant position which is 46.3%. Lexical units which represent the cognithemes set a problematic task for translators. Referring mostly to stylistic correspondence translators show high level of cognitive competence and strong will of saving all the genredetermined elements in the target text