Socio-Political Text as an Object of Translation (on Material of Japanese Political Figures' Speeches)

So-called parallel texts, the corresponding original texts in different languages, have become a crossing between two or more linguacultures. Three most common grammatical constructions represented in the speeches of Japanese political figures, namely a passive voice, a causative voice, and a technique of a substantive stop taigendome, were chosen for the study. We consider these categories not only as grammatical but also as conceptual, in other words, next to their conceptual meaning in the perception of Japanese people. In order to highlight differences of these grammar categories in the representation of Japanese, Russian and English native speakers, the work undertook following steps: comparing text and discourse phenomena, determining the characteristics of socio-political text and language features of Japanese texts of socio-political discourse, analysing ways of transformation the grammatical constructions in Japanese-Russian and Japanese-English parallel texts. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used for the study. The analysis of theoretical literature demonstrated features of presented grammatical constructions in the Japanese language; by selecting and analyzing them, the differences between the original and translated texts were clearly shown. The statistical treatment shown that in the process of translation, these grammatical categories undergo transformations - neither the phenomena nor their semantics is preserved. We believe the reason is the discrepancy of native speaker’s worldview. There is a tendency to impose responsibility on the subject of the action in Russian and English, while in Japanese it seems natural to reduce the subject’s influence on the action. We suggest that the research reflected the importance of knowing the cognitive methods of translation. In turn, this contributes to the choice of effective translation strategies.