Appeal to Components of Prototypical Emotional Situations as a Translation Strategy for Expressions with Emotional Predicates

This article falls within the field of translation studies. The focus of the research is on literary texts that describe sensations, emotions, movements, behaviors, and actions of individuals. The study investigates translations from Russian into other languages as well as translations of foreign texts into Russian. Materials from the Russian National Corpus were utilized for this purpose. A substantial corpus of literary texts in English, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and French was analyzed. The findings indicate that one of the translation strategies for expressions with the specified predicates involves appealing to the components of prototypical situations of these emotions. It was revealed that one distinctive feature of expressions in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and French—particularly in contrast to Russian expressions — is the tendency to specify the organ involved in a movement, action, or sensation. Another notable characteristic of expressions in foreign languages is the tendency to refer not to the organ itself but to a part of the organ involved in the described process; for example, using “pupil” instead of “eye.”