“Untranslatable” in translation: features of Russian non-equivalent vocabulary transmission into modern Greek

The article is devoted to topical issues of modern translation studies, focusing its attention on reviewing linguo-cultural and linguo-regional aspects of the translation. Research is devoted to the problem of transmitting non-equivalent vocabulary of Russian and Modern Greek languages. Specificity of the concept of “non-equivalent vocabulary” is revealed. Classification of individual concepts and realities is presented with examples from the Russian and Modern Greek languages. The main methods of the study were transformational and comparative ones. The author describes the major modes of “untranslatable” lexical units transmission in the studied language pair. Translation operations which are used in the transmission of vocabulary without translation equivalents are considered: individual concepts (transcription methods, transliteration); realities (phonetic methods, descriptive translation, semantic neologism, approximate translation, mixed techniques, transformational translation). The author comes to the conclusion that none of the options used as the transmission sources for non-equivalent elements may serve as a full replacement of the original text.