Emotive affixes in Pavel Bazhov's tales and ways of their translation

The paper focuses on the emotive affixes used by P. Bazhov in his tales and the problem of their translation into English. In the original Russian text these affixes are important means of the colloquial language stylization as one of the basic ways of genre formation. It has been revealed that Bazhov's tales are insufficiently studied in the aspect of translation, particularly in terms of transferring their word-formation features to foreign languages. Meanwhile it is necessary to reproduce them in the target language to ensure that the impact on the readers of a different culture will be close to the perception of the Russian recipient. The comparative analysis of two English versions of the Silver Hoof tale is aimed at the solution of this complex problem. It is obvious that Russian affixal derivatives (emotives) give the text of the tale a bright emotional coloring, but it is inevitably lost in the English translations due to the differences of word-formation systems of the Russian and English languages as well as intercultural differences. The authors have analyzed the English translations of such emotive units as diminutives, pejoratives and prefixed verbs. The comparative analysis of Bazhov’s text and its English translations has revealed that the translators use the different ways to convey emotive meanings of Russian emotive affixes using language units of different levels. The authors have come to a conclusion that one should talk not so much about the untranslatability of Bazhov’s tales as about the degree of their translatability. Thus, it is supposed that a creative translator can find the ways to render the emotive meanings of the original.