Lexico-semantic relativity and versatility in translation and intercultural communication

The aim of the article is to discuss translation regularities in correlations of words that denote culture-related phenomena that exist in many cultures or that are specific to certain cultures and languages. The focus is on Russian and English culturonyms. The authors dwell on the principle of functional dualism that claims that language can equally address internal and external cultures. This principle is developed in the new linguistic discipline termed “interlinguoculturology” (Kabakchi 1998, Kabakchi & Beloglazova 2020). Nonetheless, under the impact of the World Englishes paradigm, the article points to blurring the concept of “external culture” - Russian bilinguals, speaking or writing in Russian English, use this variety for expressing their own culture; the same is true for other world Englishes that have branched from the prototypical British English model. Despite the polemical relations of the two research schools, which are close and yet different in some of their tenets, there is much in common in their semantic and pragmatic research of how varieties of English adapt and domesticate culturonyms, in particular binary words belonging to two languages and often associated with each other in translation. The paper discusses examples of binary polyonyms (“universal” culturonyms) whose meaning depends on the context of the situation and, therefore, is differently received in diverse cultures; binary analogues whose equivalent selection is based on scrutinizing the dictionary entry and on the knowledge of the cultural background, and binary interonyms that partly help translators and partly interfere with their work, being deceptive cognates differing in their referential or connotational meanings. The article concludes that the interpretation of culture-bound words in foreign-culture-oriented texts depends on various pragmatic and semantic processes and is grounded in a word semantic flexibility and its matter-of-course adaptation in a cultural and language environment.