Combining of sentences

Combining of sentences is a translational technique due to which the syntactical structures of two or more original sentences transform into one expanded structure of a compound or complex sentence in translation.

That was a long time ago. It seemed like fifty years ago.

Це було дуже давно – здавалося пройшло з півстоліття.

The only thing that worried me was our front door. It creaks like a bastard.

Одно мене бентежило – наші вхідні двері скриплять як лихо.

One is to comprehend that sentences are to be combined in the translation process in cases when two or more of them develop the same logical idea or describe the same subject.

Let’s implement this translational technique in the process of Ukrainian-English translation:

Чиновники, що стежать за процедурою виборів, обираються на двопартійній основі. Аби не допустити махінацій, вони уповноважені перевіряти права виборців на участь у голосуванні та піддавати контролю виборчі бюлетені.

As a rule translators without proficient skills translate the passage sentence by sentence:

The officials supervising the election procedure are elected on a bipartisan basis. They are entitled to check the voters’ rights and inspect the ballot papers to prevent all sorts of machinations (fraud).

This translation is quite acceptable from the grammatical point of view. Still the translated version could acquire the form more typical for English and American newspapers. The translator also is to mind stylistic modifications by taking down the register of the message and introducing colloquial elements.

Bipartisan selection of poll watchers and their right to challenge voters and their votes are designed to prevent ballot-box stuffing.

As the above example shows combining of the two sentences into the TL one both makes the text more compact and facilitates its perceiving by the final receiver, the native speaker of the English language. Partly it was achieved due to introduction of the colloquial word-combination poll-watches instead of the officials and an Americanism ballot box stuffing instead of machinations.

TOPIC FIVE

Lexico-grammatical transformations

Translational practice reveals that pure type lexical transformations come across not very frequently. Usually they mix with other operations and trigger grammatical alterations in their cross-language transformings making rather tight interlacings thus contributing to the appearance of a new category in our classification.