TRANSLATING TEXTS ON ART (ILLUSTRATED BY EXAMPLES FROM MUSEUM TEXTS IN RUSSIAN, ENGLISH AND FINNISH)

The article studies the ways of rendering stylistic and lexical features of museum texts in the Russian, English and Finnish languages in translations. Research in the field of translation of museum texts seems important in view of the growing popularity of museums and the increased number of international visitors who have to refer to translated texts. The study uses the texts of Kiasma and the Helsinki Art Museum (HAM), Helsinki, as well as the texts of the Museum and Exhibition Complex of Small Arms named after M. T. Kalashnikov, Izhevsk. The source languages (SL) of the analyzed texts were Russian and Finnish, the target languages (TL) were Russian and English. The objective of this research was to study the peculiarities of translating museum texts. In the course of the study, a linguistic analysis of texts in the SL was carried out. It was found that museum texts feature a combination of different functional styles. In addition to publicist and scientific styles, museum texts can have some features of fiction, formal business and colloquial functional styles. The study showed a link between the type of the museum text or the nature of the museum and the functional style of the text. In the course of a comparative and translation analysis of texts in the SL and the TL, the main stylistic and lexical problems of translating museum texts were identified, and optimal translation solutions for conveying the stylistic and lexical features of museum texts were described. It was found that lexical translation problems were most often associated with idioms and the vocabulary lacking equivalents in the TL, as well as the dependence of texts on the visual component of works of art. Stylistic problems, in turn, were due to the need to preserve the functional and stylistic characteristics of the original.