Strategies of Rendering Culture-Specific Items in Ukrainian Translations of Political Thrillers by M. Dobbs

The paper focuses on the ideographic classification of the political culture-specific items in the thrillers ‘House of Cards’, ‘To Play the King’, ‘The Final Cut’ by M. Dobbs and their rendition in Ukrainian translations. The research underlines that the study of culture-specific items plays a significant role in linguistic and translational research due to the anthropocentric view of the language and cultural turn in translation. The paper proves that political thrillers that portray British political life are based on a number of political culture-specific items that help the writer reveal the specific character of the topic. Those items are classified on the ideographic principle in order to reveal the main topics of British political life. The latter are not universally known outside the UK and may present difficulty in translation due to the absence of their regular correspondences in the target language. The paper in question analyses the ways of culture-specific items rendition in the Ukrainian translations of M. Dobbs’ political thrillers in terms of foreignization and domestication strategies, their tactics and techniques. As a result, the tactics of transcoding which include techniques of transliteration, transcription and their combination, tactics of direct borrowing, calque and item addition or substitution were singled out within the strategy of foreignization. Tactics which combine transcoding with naturalisation alone or naturalisation and descriptive translation and tactics of item substitution or addition with descriptive translation present the strategy of partial foreignization. Domestication is implemented through the tactics of generalisation, descriptive translation and cultural or situational equivalent.