Translation of “Do androids dream of electric sheep?” by Philip K. Dick into Russian: unreasonable transformations and semantic mistakes

As the result of comparative analysis performed on the original text of the novel and its translation into Russian, several fragments were revealed where the translator made semantic mistakes, some of them being quite rough. The study carried out to identify the reasons of this phenomenon to occur shows that some of these mistakes were caused by the unreasonable use of lexical-grammatical transformations during the translation of the text, primarily the transformations of addition and omission. Other semantic mistakes appeared in the translation either because the translator was not paying enough attention to what he was doing or he failed to read the context properly. The paper provides the brief review of basic lexical-grammatical transformations used in the process of translation, as well as the analysis of translation of several fragments in the novel containing rough semantic mistakes. The results of the research are used to draw some conclusions regarding the causes for the semantic mistakes to occur; the paper also figures out the role of the unreasonable lexical-grammatical transformations in making some of these mistakes.