COMMUNICATIVE PARADIGM OF A LITERARY WORK: THE MEGATEXT STRUCTURE OF THE ORIGINAL AND ITS FOREIGN LANGUAGE TRANSFORM
Authors: Kolegaeva I. M. 
Published: March 2024

The annotated study is devoted to the analysis of the phenomenon of the communicative paradigm, that is, the totality of a certain literary work and its communicative transform — a translated version in the unity of all existing megatext components. The object of the comparative study was the reference megatext, which included the main text of Y. Harari’s monograph “Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind” and its auxiliary text messages: footnotes, comments, etc., and its communicative transform, megatextual Ukrainian version: Ю. Харарі, «Sapiens. Людина розумна. Коротка історія людства» in a combination of the main and auxiliary communicative components. The list of the latter turned out to be non-identical in the reference text and its communicative transform. The analysis highlighted the presence of two opposite tendencies of communicative transformations that appear as a result of the involvement of additional communicative figures (those of the translator and the editor of the Ukrainian edition of the work) in the communicative chain of the addresser (author)–the original text–(addressee) reader. Communication takes the following modified form: addresser (author)–original text– translator/editor–translated text — (addressee) translation reader. On the one hand, the transformed version demonstrates the narrowing of the information volume of the megatext (due to the removal of the subject index and the list of sources of illustrative materials, the reduction of the number of pictographic messages). On the other hand, the Ukrainian version of the publication significantly expands the amount of information that the megatext-transform conveys, due to enlightening comments added by the translator in page-by-page footnotes. The reader of the translated version of Y. Harari’s monograph receives additional information on the subject of discussion. These may be historical references to the cultural phenomena referred to in the original, or new data that have appeared during the period of time that has passed between the publication of the original and the appearance of its translated version. The Ukrainian-speaking reader of the megatext learns about new angles of the discussed problems, and also receives information about the appearance of Ukrainian publications related to the topic. The translator takes over the function of commentator and interpreter, in which the educational characteristic of the analyzed discursive phenomenon is clearly manifested. As a result of the mentioned megatextual and architectural transformations, we note a change in the image of the hypothetical reader of the Ukrainian version of the megatext, rather than the one that was embedded in the reference megatext. In particular, the expected thesaurus reserves of the Ukrainian reader turn out to be smaller than that of the reader of the original text, which is also evidenced by the extended version of the title: it contains an explanation of the Latin word Sapiens. Людина розумна, no such analog is observed in the original version of the title of the monograph. Eventually, we conclude that the reference text and its communicative transform are close, but not identical, communicative phenomena.