Kulttuurisilla aikavyöhykkeillä

Päivän osat suomi venäjä-käännössuunnassa

Authors

• Juho Härme Tampereen yliopisto

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.61200/mikael.129417

Keywords:

contrastive analysis, temporal expressions, Finnish, Russian

Abstract

Translators working from Finnish to Russian often have problems finding equivalents for the Finnish words iltapäivä ( afternoon ) and aamupäivä (a similar expression denoting the time before noon). I argue that this problem is due to fundamental differences in how the day is divided into smaller segments in Finnish and Russian. To show this, three sets of possible equivalents were compared with iltapäivä and aamupäivä. All of them were found problematic
in some respect, especially in cases where aamupäivä or iltapäivä are used as grammatical subjects or otherwise referentially. This leads to the conclusion that rather than translating single words or expressions, the translator is in fact transitioning between different systems of expressing time.