ENGLISH NEOLOGICAL UNITS WITH CLIMATE AND THEIR TRANSLATION INTO UKRAINIAN

Abstract

The article is focused on English word combinations and compound adjectives with climate, which have come into use over the last 50 years, reflecting the growing significance of climate change and vigorous discussion of its mitigation in the public discourse. The study combines qualitative and quantitative approaches, with partial involvement of corpus techniques. We identify the most common collocations and compound adjectives with climate in the NOW (News on the Web) corpus of English, discussing the context of their use and semantic categories they fall into. Thus, among novel climate collocations we distinguish such categories as: 1) terminological units that denote the process of climate change as such ("climate emergency", "climate catastrophe"); 2) units that refer to the efforts of climate change mitigation on state and international levels ("climate summit", "climate finance"); 3) units that refer to negative emotional states related to a person’s preoccupation with climate change ("climate grief", "climate doomism"). We particularly address the changing terminological landscape in this area, as powerful and emotionally laden phrases "climate emergency", "climate crisis" and others are replacing the more neutral “climate change". Furthermore, we trace the ways of translation of common units with climate into Ukrainian based on Ukrainian-language web sources and legislative documents. It has been established that a high extent of variability currently exists in the rendition of climate units into Ukrainian. The most common variation is between a calque and permutation ("climate resilience" – "кліматична стійкість" / "стійкість до зміни клімату") or between a calque and explicatory translation ("climate policy" – "кліматична політика" / "політика у сфері зміни клімату"). We point out some cases where explicatory translation and synonymous substitution are more preferable than calquing with regard to accuracy (for example, "climate smart" – "кліматично орієнтований" rather than "кліматично розумний").