SEMANTIC BOUNDARIES OF THE TERM “PARTNERSHIP” IN THE ASPECT OF TRANSLATION INTO RUSSIAN

Abstract

Тhe article aims at a historical-etymological, defi nitional and lexical-semantic analysis of the term “partnership” as one of the key terms for the categorical and conceptual apparatus of Anglo-American law. The author examines the cases of using this term to nominate various forms of business activities and its translation into Russian in order to ensure its adequate understanding by participants in professional communication. The article analyzes the seminal composition of the generic term (hyperonym) “partnership”, subordinate synonyms and their Russian-language equivalents based on lexicographic and legislative defi nitions. The research material was the texts of codes, laws and other normative legal acts in the fi eld of corporate law of the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States, the texts of the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Modern American English, as well as dictionary entries of monolingual and bilingual legal dictionaries. It is generally believed that the legal term “partnership” under study does not cause diffi culties when translated into Russian, however, the results of the study showed that the intra-industry terminological polysemy within the framework of the sub-branch of business law is characteristic of the equivalent term “partnership”, due to the presence of fi ve legally fi xed meanings; the term equivalent “partnership” is characterized by determinologization beyond the limits of the language of law with a rather vague denotation with ambiguous historical connotations. The way to eliminate the grounds for translation collisions is to turn to a fi eld approach to the structure of the meaning of a polysemous term, which allows to visualize the semantic structure of each lexico-semantic variant (sememe) not in isolation, but as an integral component of the fi eld, in conjunction with other semantic units.