Songs and pecularities of their translation in the context of intercultural communication (on the material of Ukrainian and English songs having a national-cultural component)
Authors:   Mariupol State University, Peftieva Olena , Khodarieva Vladyslava ,   Mariupol State University, Khorovets Vira ,   Mariupol State University
Published: May 2023

Intercultural communication is a set of all forms of communication between representatives of different cultures. The goal of intercultural communication is to establish interaction between cultures, with language as a link. The effectiveness of intercultural communication depends on an adequate understanding and interpretation of symbols and markers of social space, as well as on the use of linguistic means to convey their meaning. The article deals with the role of a song in the formation of a national-ethnic consciousness and emphasizes the importance of song exchange between representatives of different cultures in the process of progressive globalization. It is stated that a song, as one of the most important musical genres, is able to accurately and figuratively reflect various aspects of people's lives, as it has verbal lyrics. Songs reflect the most important values, ethical views, social ideas and changes of a certain era, create patterns of behavior, establish cultural norms and and transmits them to the next generations. The study identifies the necessity of translating foreign songs in the context of building strong relationships in intercultural communication. Song lyrics is a special genre of poetry. The need to preserve the rhythm and rhyme on the one hand, and the words as well as the meaning behind them on the other, make the translation of a song so difficult. When translating poems, significant changes to the original text are inevitable. In this regard, many difficulties arise in translation, and to overcome them a translator must have special skills and a certain amount of experience. In this article, three types of song translation are distinguished: word-for-word or "informative" translation, interpretation, and equirhythmic translation. The latter is characterized by the preservation of the melody and the reproduction of the lyrics of the song as accurately as possible. The factors that determine the choice of one particular method have been specified in this article as well. If the goal is simply to understand the meaning of a foreign song, a semantically close prose translation is suitable. But if the song is to be performed in another language, it is necessary to achieve «singability» of the translated text. In addition to the difficulties caused by the need to reflect certain ethnic realities properly, the factors that make the translation of songs so difficult are: the different length of lexical units in the source language and the target language, which makes it difficult to preserve the rhythm of the song; pauses in the melody, which can cause a break in the semantic segment; parallel constructions and multiple repetitions, which can lead to unnatural translation; use of realia and connotative meanings of words that is difficult to reflect in the target language, etc. In order to describe the lexical-grammatical transformations used in the process of translation, the Ukrainian and English songs having a national-cultural component have been analyzed in the article. In the studied material, such translation transformations as modulation, addition, omission, calquing, transcription and complex transformations affecting both the lexical and grammatical levels and completely changing the structure of original sentences have been observed. The analyzed translations have a high quality, and they are good examples of a proper equirhythmic translation.