Linguocultural peculiarities of the literary translation of Robert Burns’s poem My Heart’s in the Highlands into Abkhaz language by the poet-translator Platon Bebia

The article considers Robert Burns’s poem My Heart’s in the Highlands in the translation reception of Abkhaz poet-translator Platon Bebia. The scientific novelty of this work is determined by the attempt to delve into the peculiarities of the literary translation made by the Abkhaz poet. The purpose of the article is to analyze the patterns of interlanguage correspondences and to determine the lexical and semantic features of translating a poem into Abkhaz language. The research objectives include identifying the basic symbols and concepts that define the ethnocultural worldview of the author and the poet-translator. Context analysis shows the transformations and semantic shifts that occur when choosing necessary concepts for adequate translation into a different linguistic and cultural context. The use of the comparative method allowed to compare the effectiveness of the translation strategies in poetic transfer to a secondary text. A comparative analysis is carried out to identify the influence of lexical substitutions and their consequences for the original text. For this purpose, individual conceptual images, compositional and stylistic characteristics are explained. The research material includes the poem by R. Burns My Heart’s in the Highlands, as well as the translation texts by Samuil Marshak and Platon Bebia. The result of this research indicates that the poet Platon Bebia, an Abkhaz poet deeply rooted in his native culture, successfully employed the resources of his language to convey to the contemporary Abkhaz readership the nuanced spectrum of emotions expressed by the Scottish poet towards his homeland. The analyzed material testifies competent cultural interpretation of the Abkhaz translator of Burns’s individual motifs, images, and poetics. Due to the similarity of the author’s and translator’s worldviews, the equivalent translation into Abkhaz language, preserving symbolic images and semantic expression, has been successfully accomplished by Bebia.

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