SHIPBUILDING TERMINOLOGY ASYMMETRY IN ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN THROUGH TRANSLATION EQUIVALENCE

Abstract

Тhe purpose of this paper is to detect asymmetry in the shipbuilding terminology system in Russian and English within comparative research of shipbuilding terminology in these languages. The research is relevant due to the necessity to overcome the communication diffi culties caused by the inconsistency in terminology systems of the English professional language and the Russian one. The subject of the research is the translation equivalence of the English and Russian shipbuilding terms. The paper considers semantic equivalence, namely the equivalence of the lexical units of the Russian and English shipbuilding terminology systems. The author suggests outlining several equivalence degrees of the matching terms. Moreover, the paper stipulates a method of detecting the equivalence degree of the matching shipbuilding terms through comparative semantic and structural analysis that is based on the four criteria: one- or two-way translation of the matching terms from Russian into English and vice versa, intralinguistic bonds between the terms, formal structure of the terms, structural position of the term in the hierarch of the terminology system. As a tool of verifying the criteria, the author used the bilingual shipbuilding thesaurus compiled at the previous step of the research. The thesaurus contains the following information: defi nition of the terms, semantic and association bonds between the terms, hierarchy of the terms in the terminology system. The paper suggests an example of using the method of translation equivalence detection with the matching terms «буксир» and «tug» from the Russian and English terminology systems respectively. Furthermore, 121 matching terms were analysed with respect to the described method, which led to the conclusion that there is signifi cant asymmetry between the terminology systems.