STYLISTIC MEANS OF IMPLEMENTING THE IDEA OF THE WORLD’S IRIDESCENCE IN PH.K. DICK’S “UBIK” IN THE CONTEXT OF TRANSLATION TRANSFORMATIONS
Authors:   Sumy State Pedagogical University, Aleksenko Svitlana F. , Taranenko Larysa I. ,   National Technical University of Ukraine “Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute”
Published: December 2024

The article deals with the formation means of the idea of the world’s iridescence or illusiveness, its
stylistic and translation aspects within the textual framework of Ph.K. Dick’s novel “Ubik” and its translat-
ed version in Ukrainian.
The relevance of the study is defined by general scarcity of current enquiries highlighting stylistic
means of moulding the idea of the world’s iridescence in science fiction as well as translation methods of
delivering it from English to Ukrainian.
The purpose of this scientific inquiry is to identify the stylistic devices that play a role in the delinea-
tion of ways in which reality may be reduced to tatters in comparison with a coherent state of things and to
pinpoint the translation techniques of rendering the related contexts from English into Ukrainian. The top-
icality of the study is determined by the paucity of relevant research focusing on the kernel of the prevail-
ing theme in Dick’s “Ubik”, namely illusiveness of reality, and translation techniques and transformations
that help adequately deliver the significant sequences from English into Ukrainian.
It is argued that the idea in question being the core of the prevailing theme in Dick’s “Ubik” is at-
tained by means of incorporating several ontological planes represented by mental constructs, or reali-
ties, focalised through the perceptions and personalities of different characters of the novel. Contextu-
al and text interpretation analyses enabled the authors to determine and interpret those semantic domi-
nants that underpin the formation of the world’s iridescence effect in the novel, namely: “alternate reali-
ties”, “dream as a variant of reality”, “changes in time and space”, “changes of forms of consciousness and
existence”. It has been proven these dominants’ diegetic interrelation. The idea of the world’s iridescence
in the novel is brought about by the literary work’s fluctuating plot convolutions stemming from seemingly
incoherent planes of different sections of the novel: a mosaic of the primary diegesis together with several
hypo-diegeses comes across as a kind of an ontic hazy maze building up to an overall effect of the world’s
fluidity and oscillation.
The method of stylistic analysis was applied to interpret stylistic phenomena inherent in the novel
in relation to their contribution to the studied idea as those were found functioning in the relevant textu-
al microcontexts and enhancing the aforementioned semantic dominants. It was esti mated that expres- estimated that expres-
sive means and devices of stylistic syntax constitute four fifths of the whole researched corpus of units,
thus playing a major role in the formation of the idea of the world’s illusiveness (those include aposiopesis,
rhetoric questions, asyndeton, and nominative sentences) while expressive means and stylistic devices of
stylistic semasiology prove much less numerous, accounting for a fifth of the units analysed (presented by
metaphors, epithets, similes, antitheses). Among the typical translation methods, instrumental in the rel-
evant textual sequences in “Ubik”, a share of lexical and semantic transformations equals 60.2% of the re-
searched sets of translation counterparts, with modulation and specification being the dominant ones and
logical synonymy, calquing and lexical compensation trailing behind. Grammatical transformations com-
pose nearly two fifths (39.8 %) of the researched body of units, the most efficient ones being substitution
and word order change.
The results of the study enabled understanding the interaction mechanism of semantics of the leit-
motif of a literary work, its stylistic representation and translation solutions of its delivery from English into
Ukrainian. We envisage the prospects for further research in studying linguistic aspects of cross-cultural
conveying symbolic significance of recurring narrative elements.