- The term “connotation” is rather ambiguous. There are different points of view on what does this term include. It’s obvious and everyone agrees that connotation is a part of the denotation\connotation opposition and the connotation includes additional meanings, various stylistic emotional, expressive and other aspects that always accompany that particular denotation (denotation is the nominative, main and primary meaning of the word). However in the Russian terminology there isn’t any consolidated opinion: does the connotation include associations and occasional, contextual emotions and meanings or not. In English studies of that matter the term “connotation” is broader and does include all shades of meaning, emotions and associations, which have both or one of speakers and which are in all language and culture as some kind of background knowledge. But actually this term always means additional meanings of word, meanings and shades of meaning that appeared because of previous usage of word in the whole history language and culture and are clear to anyone who could understand references and so on
- Orwellian= “authoritarian”, “controlling”, “all animal are equal, but some of them are more equal”, “Big Brother”
- internal dialogic nature of language (Бахтин)
- There are also stylistic connotations. They are marked in dictionaries with special labels: literary, slang, formal, euphemistic etc.
- kill (neutral), slay (literary), finish off (colloquial)
- It’s very pity and not very professional when stylistically marked words are translated into target language with their neutral equivalents
- (Вообще 2 и 3 может быть не так уж надо) The same thing is with translating words expressing or describing emotions.
- Окаянный – miserable (перевели Чехова)
- our diminutive (уменьшительные) suffixes: рожа-рожица, старик-старичок-старикашка old man как-то не звучит => stylistic compensation to express positive or negative connotations
- PRESUPPOSITION is smth the speaker assumes to be the case prior to making an utterance. Что-то, что говорящие и так знают, кроме конкретного разговора.
- It seems natural that connotations, a great clouds of meanings and emotions that surrounds many meaningful words, that these connotations are used to form metaphors. Metaphor ”is an expression which describes a person or an object in a figurative way by referring to smth that is considered to possess similar characteristics to a person or object you are trying to describe”. Conceptual metaphor refers to a concept – a very meaningful cultural notion connected with a word. Golden = золотой=дорогой и ценный, because gold is a concept, which have it’s meaning.
Metaphors are broadly used by politicians: president race and so on, because metaphor catches our attention and makes our mind, our fantasy work with images.
Some metaphors, which are based on realias, can be rendered in a descriptive way wallflower~девушка на танцах без кавалера (у стены ждёт приглашения на танец), but such a metaphor is always a creative challenge for a translator.
