DOCUMENTARY FROM TRANSLATION PERSPECTIVE (BASED ON THE TRANSLATION OF THE DOCUMENTARY “A LIFE IN JAPAN”)

The article discusses one of the problems of audiovisual translation – translation of documentary films, taking “A Life in Japan” by a Swedish director Petri Storlopare as an example. The choice of the film was determined by the presence of difficult situations from the point of view of translation, as well as by the lack of Russian translation. The paper considers typical characteristics of an operational interview which is an important constituent of the film under study. Special attention is given to the problem of synphase in voice-over translation. The topic is relevant as there are no fundamental theoretical papers devoted to translation of documentaries, both in domestic and foreign translation studies. The main goal was to consider the existing algorithms and strategies of audiovisual translation and to find the most optimal ways of translating the definite documentary film. We employed the following methods of analyzing the data: comparative analysis, lexicographic analysis, contextual analysis and communicative analysis. The conducted research allows to define the main problems of translating documentaries, they include transmitting the meaning of realia of another country's culture and solving the “phase shift” problem when syncing the text in voice-over translation. In this paper we tried to account for our own translation solutions. The research has shown that it is possible to achieve adequacy of translation by using compression, a certain set of transformations and techniques for transferring the meaning of culturally marked lexical units.