Sermon (Religious Genre)

Recently translators more often have to translate sermons – addressing to laymen, for a long time existing basically in oral variant. But this text is so specific, that experience of translation of other texts will not be helpful. Expansion of missionary work makes this problem so much actual as never before.

The main content of sermon is instruction (admonition), based on two cognitive items, uniting the priest (preacher), speaking on behalf of his church, and congregation (here – recipient). First of all, performance of this kind contains the text of the Holy Scripture, well-known to believers, as well as the information about the visual environment, typical household situations, familiar or new cases of daily life, used as a basis for admonition.

Means of implementing thecommunicative task are applied within strict framework of the canon. In all modern European languages one of its basic stylistic signs is the use of old literary norm of elevated style. In Ukrainian and Russian sermons there are very many archaic features, therefore while translating, the archaic stylization of the original should be strengthened in every possible way. Thus the translator should familiarize with the texts of similar sermons both in the language of original, and that of translation, without speaking about knowledge of the Bible.

The important feature of a sermon is the use of direct or latent citations from the Holy Scripture. One should to translate them, taking ready fragments from the available text of the Bible, and it is desirable not to resort to improvisation.

In sermons the Biblical names and toponyms (place-names), having steady traditional equivalents, are often mentioned.

Emotional influence of sermon is formed on rhetorical syntactic means: intonations, rhetorical questions, exclamations. But in translation rendering these features by equivalent means usually does not cause any difficulty.

Conclusions: Lexical and syntactic means of high archaic style, rendered by means of variant correspondence and transformations are the dominants of translating sermons. Biblical names and toponyms are rendered by traditional equivalents. Citations from the Bible are reproduced according to the initial text.