THE THIRD LANGUAGE IN TRANSLATOIN

Translation often reads like «a foreign language», and we say, instinctively, «it sounds wrong». A reader may understand the face value of the words, may see no evident flaw in the structure of the sentence, may find nothing wrong with the word-order, with the idioms or figures of speech – yet still he/she may feel uneasy. That is what is figuratively called the «third language» in translation. Whatever the material the translator is working with, he/she will have to take the content of the source language and reshape it in the form of the target language. One of the main difficulties a translator encounters is the inevitable influence of the form of the source language. Once the thoughts have been given a particular shape – set down in certain words in a certain word-order – it is hard to conceive of them as having a different shape. The main concern of the article is therefore to reveal the problems in translation practice, ranging from the meaning of single words and expressions to grammatical categories and textual coherence and cohesion that forge the «third language»