THE TRANSLATION PRINCIPLES OF LEXICAL LACUNAS IN YURII VYNNYCHUK’S SHORT STORY “THE NIGHT REPORTER”

Abstract

Yurii Vynnychuk’s artistic speaking model is simple and effective. He is a writer with an unrivaled personal style and rich language, who understands the historical context, works with folklore sources and ethnographic knowledge, and knows how to enchant, mystify, and stylize the language in accordance with the local Lviv dialect (Tsihotskyi, 2021, p. 73). However, it is precisely because of the author’s distinctive language style and strong local flavor that there are regular cultural lacunas in his writings. As a result, his fantastic work has not been translated into Chinese and made available to Chinese readers. The relevance of this research has been how to integrate the analysis of cultural differences with the author’s linguistic characteristics, design appropriate translation rules in the translation process, and eliminate these lacunas. According to the cultural hierarchy theory of Chinese scholars Liu Xun, this paper counts and divides the lexical lacunas in Yurii Vynnychuk’s short story «The Night Reporter» into lexical lacunas of material culture, conceptual culture, behavioral culture, and institutional culture, and proposes the translation principle of lacunarity phenomenon by analyzing the usage characteristics of various lexical lacunas, which are the purpose and task of this paper. The result is succinctly stated as follows based on the statistical analysis, interpretation, and description of lexical lacunas in the text: When dealing with the problem of lexical lacunas in literary translation, translators should focus on both pragmatic transmission and the semantic functions while attempting to replicate the aesthetic impact of the original text in terms of text genre and linguistic form. The conclusion of this paper has guiding significance for the theoretical selection of lacunarity phenomena in literary translation in the future, which is in line with the prospect of further research.