The Problem of Sound Effects Determination and their Transfer from a Source Language to a Target Language. Application of Source Language and Target Language Corpora to Adapt Sound Effects using the Example the Official and Unofficial Translations of “The Dark Knight Returns”

Introduction. The article considers the problem of determining whether sound effects belong to the class of interjections and transferring them from the source language to the target language. The source of sound effects is the comic book “The Dark Knight Returns” by Frank Miller, which contains a large number of onomatopoeias typical for comics, as well as those created by the author. The relevance of the study is caused not only with the great popularity of comics, but also with the growth in the number of content (animated films, in particular) where sound effects accompany the visuals. The purpose of this study is to show that onomatopoeias can be found as the original word (noun, verb, etc.) using corpora that will help transfer it from the source language to the target language. Methodology and sources. The main research methods are semantic analysis by means of which the semantic content of onomatopoeia in the original is determined. The comparative-contrastive method reveals the common properties and differences of onomatopoeia in the original and translations, and how the corpora of the English and Russian languages help to more precisely determine the meaning and choose the best transfer method. The empirical basis of the study was Frank Miller's comic book “The Dark Knight Returns” and its translations into Russian. Results and discussion. The onomatopoeia used by the author of the comic book is considered in detail. Firstly, onomatopoeias with an implicit meaning and an easily traceable origin and onomatopoeias with an unclear source were identified. Secondly, the translations of onomatopoeias of the target language are considered, with examples taken from both the official and unofficial translations. To explain the validity of the choice of a language unit (both in the original and in the translation), references are made to the corpora of the Russian and English languages. Most examples of onomatopoeia are typical for comics, so their transfer did not cause problems, however, the visual component of the comic was the mean of transfer to SL for original onomatopoeia with unclear meaning. Conclusion. Sound effects are an integral part of comics. Whether they should be considered separately or together with interjections is an open question. However, in this work, their transferring from the SL to the TL is what important. In this work, a special feature is the application of text corpora to find the use of a word which meaning is used in the comic (the visual component acts as a marker), as well as to track the origin (i.e. the original word). All this can simplify the translator's work when transferring sound effects.

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