TRANSLATION AND ADAPTATION: INTERSECTING RELATIONSHIPS

Abstract

The article analyses adaptation in relation to key categories and concepts in translation studies. The aim of the article is to substantiate sociocultural and pragmatic adaptation as a distinct translation method in its intersections with translation models, foreignization and domestication strategies, paradigms in translation studies, the concept of dynamic equivalence, and the category of coherence. Pragmatic adaptation is related to the functional model of translation, according to which the translator is guided by institution-specified parameters of the target text, adapting the source text to the target-text purpose. Sociocultural adaptation correlates with the denotative model, using it in cases where the choice of translation variant is impossible without reference to the situational context presented in the source text, as well as with the communicative model, which includes various components of the extralinguistic context. Both types of adaptation align with the informative model of translation, oriented towards conveying different types of information from the source text—not only denotative but also connotative, sociocultural, pragmatic, and encyclopedic. In terms of translation typology, adaptation correlates with transcoding – achieving text equivalence by simplifying its structure and content to make the translated text more accessible to an audience lacking the necessary knowledge. It also aligns with communicative translation, which aims to achieve an effect on the target text readers equivalent to that of the source text. From the perspective of the main paradigms in translation studies, adaptation strategies correlate with the cultural paradigm in its cognitive-semantic and real-cultural dimensions. Adaptation is applied in cases of linguistic, cultural, conceptual-semantic, value-based, normative, contextual, and idiomatic non-equivalence. In translation adaptation, the translator can apply either foreignization or domestication, or combine both. When using the domestication strategy, the main techniques involve free, idiomatic or communicative translation, and actual adaptation. The concept of adaptation is related to the dynamic equivalence, as opposed to formal equivalence. From the perspective of cohesion and coherence categories reproduced in translation, adaptation correlates with co