English idioms and their Russian equiavalents

A rhythmically arranged translation of a proverb might be still in need of a preliminary 'introduction' like "as the saying goes", "as we in Russia say", etc. (Such an 'introduction' is, in fact, an "appeal" to the listener or reader: "Please understand that this is said figuratively!"). And a rhymed translation may nоt need this at all.

Epigrams and translation.

"А ларчик просто открывался" (which is a quotation from the fable "Ларчик" И. А. Крылова) is a stylistic device termed an epigram. Such quotations from writers' works have become proverbs. Consequently, this permits us to treat epigrams as proverbs in the process of translation.

This means 1hat our translations of epigrams should be rhymed and have rhythm as proverbs often should (and be brief as proverbs should, too, because proverbs are used mostly in monologues and dialogues and not in author's narration). And this is why we have to foresee the possibility of translating epigrams in the form of two-line rhymed verses.

For instance, the translation

Нельзя ли для таких прогулок Подальше выбрать закоулок?

Could you not choose, When forth you sally, Some more remote And proper alley?

...is the translation of the epigram made as a verse and not proverb-like. (It is too long in space to be used in one's interpreting, say, a conversation or speech without difficulty.) We have to make it sound brief and, thus, proverbial. For instance, the variant:

"It's no place for your parades. It's no place for promenades."

...may satisfy us because the epigram really means "Never choose this place for your promenades" or "It's net a proper place for your promenades," or the like. However, this epigram sounds sarcastic ("Нельзя ли...") and this effect should be reproduced in our translation:

"It's no place for your parades, nor for Sunday promenades."

Another specific point in translating epigrams is that 'transposition' itself may not convey the idea of the epigram in full for the reason that a Russian listener takes in not merely what an epigram says but what is behind it, what it means being a small part of a bigger context.

One of K. S. Stanislavsky's ideas was that an actor (i.e. a translator, in our case) should know well not only the words he had to say (i.e. the meaning of the epigram's components,, in our case) but also what events had taken place behind the stage (i.e. the situation that had given life to the epigram) prior to the moment he started acting accordingly. And this may be applicable to our translating epigrams more often than not.

Hence, our proverb-like translation should better convey the highlights of the general situation in which the epigram gets its specific meaning. For instance, life shows that one might translate the epigram:

"Раззудись, плечо! Размахнись, рука!"

...as (a) "Don't hustle, don't bustle, But strain every muscle!"

This is sure to convey the idea of the epigram's components, of the words ("Strain every muscle") neglecting the situation of 'cutting hay' as is actually described in the whole verse (and which the English listener, unlike the Russian one, will never presuppose nor understand upon hearing the epigram's words only). This is why we suggest the variant:

(b) "Swing and sway — Cut the hay!"

We could not ignore the bigger context ('hay-cutting') which is always presupposed by the Russian people when they use this epigram.

Classification of translations

As far as the results of our translation process are concerned, they can be classified as follows.

(1) Translation by an English absolute monoequivalent.²⁸

Example:

время — деньги - time's money

(2) Translation by an English relative equivalent.

Example:

семь бед — один ответ - we might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb

(3) Translation by a synonymous equivalent.

In the original: выносить сор из избы.

In translation: to tell tales out of school;

(4) Translation by a translator's equivalent.

(a) being an innovated English proverb, example:

Ларчик открывается просто.

It's easy to open this poke and see the pig.

(b) based on English phrases or/and their components; example:

— Молодец! — сказал Цветков.—  Люблю парня за ухватку. Сразу  видно, что молодец среди овец. (Ю. Герман, Я отвечаю за все)

"Good chap," Tsvetkov said. "I like a good chap for his brave ways. I can tell right away that you'd be brave as a lion with a lamb."

(c) based on an English proverb's structure; example:"

Всяк кулик свое болото хвалит.

Every snipe praises its own bog.

(d) arranged rhythmically or/and rhymed; example:

На войне, чтобы обмануть врага, чтобы нанести ему неожиданный удар, придется совершать марши подлиннее и потяжелее, чем этот. Это — цветочки, а ягодки будут впереди. (А. Бек, Волоколамское шоссе)

In war, to surprise the enemy, and to deal him a blow from an unexpected quarter, we will have to make much longer and more difficult marches than this one. It's only child's play to what is on the way.

(e) by metaphorical explanation; example:

Вот уж воистину голодной лисе всё  куры снятся!

This is really a case оf a hungry fox dreaming about chickens.

 

Translating by English equivalents

Translating by English equivalents (being relative more often than riot) seems to be the most productive way of making our proverbs' translations figurative.

When using this method, translators and interpreters have to observe that an equivalent is properly selected from the dictionary, that is, the chosen equivalent:

(a) should be able to convey the Russian proverb's indices for interpretation: meaning, usage, overtones and style;

(b) it should particularly answer the obligatory requirement that its meaning could be understood even by those who hear the English proverb for the first time.

(c) Besides, it is preferable that the equivalent itself should not be archaic,

(d) and its image should be as close to that of the Russian proverb as possible.

(e) The equivalent should not have undesirable connotations.

 

Chapter 2. The Development of Students Language Awareness on the Base of Using Idioms in Classes

 

2.2.1 Pedagogical implications

This paper offers some suggestions (including sample exercises) for the teaching of idiomatic language. First, the relation between non-idiomatic and erroneous language in foreign language learning is examined, and it is concluded that non-idiomatic sentences do not so much break categorical rules as venture into the grey area of weak combinatorial probabilities between linguistic items. Idiomaticity is thus seen as a scale, but less idiomatic is not necessarily to be equated with less acceptable, since both conventionalised and original language have their place in discourse. Crucial is the issue of appropriateness in context. Full-blown idioms represent firm collocations whose meaning is conventionalised and metaphorical. Where this meaning takes on an aphoristic quality we have proverbs. The underlying principle of metaphor provides a structural systematicity to the lexis, which extends far beyond full idioms into all but the most core uses of lexical items. It is suggested that exercises of a problem-solving nature will help learners to unearth these pervasive metaphors in idiomatic language, and some exercises are presented.

This has important pedagogical implications. Bartlett²⁹ (1932) established in a whole series of experiments in which subjects were presented with incomplete or inconclusive drawings or narratives that subjects sought to impose meaning on the item by fitting it into their own meaning structures. Thus, stories which contained references to unfamiliar cultural practices were modified in memory so as to fit in with subjects' own cultural expectations. Bartlett called this essential characteristic of human cognitive processing "effort after meaning". The very fact that idiomatic language and proverbs are so semantically opaque makes them excellently suited to a problem-solving approach in teaching which can exploit learners' innate cognitive drive to make sense out of their environment. The exercises presented below are intended to be purely indicative of the approach I am advocating, rather than being a recipe for success. There is nothing cut and dried about them. Rather, they are intended merely as guidelines whereby the teacher can stimulate cognitive activity. They are intended to be used not as a testing instrument but as a teaching aid to provoke discussion and brain-storming. Comparisons with the L1 should be encouraged so that learners become aware in which respects their language resembles English in the underlying conceptual metaphors it employs and where it differs. In multi-cultural classes interesting patterns of similarity and difference emerge here, and clearly this is a field which has been hardly researched. Students will become highly motivated to translate their language's metaphor into English so as to impart to the class their own culture's method of metaphorical encoding. Sometimes reasons for similarities and differences among languages can be adduced from obvious cultural differences (e.g. metaphors deriving from the Bible in Christian cultures, or differences concerning gastronomy, climate, geography), but some- times differences are not explicable. I have also found that students react evaluatively to different metaphors in different languages, such as English a bull in a china shop compared to German an elephant in a china shop. One can debate which the «better» metaphor is.

Sample Exercises: A

Task: 1) Try to work out the meaning of these idioms.

2) Do you have idioms in your language which have the same meaning as some of these?

a storm in a teacup

to have your heart in your mouth

to have a bone to pick with someone

to cut off your nose to spite your face

to drink like a fish

to kill two birds with one stone

to be like a cat on hot bricks

to make a mountain out of a molehill

to pull someone's leg

once bitten twice shy

Comment: This exercise should be done in groups. The teacher should  
first make sure that the literal meaning of each lexical item is known to the class. (Dictionaries should not be used). Otherwise students are not in a position to employ inferencing strategies. Often L1 idioms will help students to arrive at the solution. Sometimes there will be false friends, however. This is all to the good, since when the teacher goes through the solutions, it is the incorrect guesses which will be focused on so as to aid retention in memory of the correct solution, which the teacher will first try to coax from students and, if all fails, will explain.

In the above form the exercise is suitable for advanced students. Much interesting discussion and exchange of information will arise from inter-lingual comparisons in a multilingual class, as students work hard to literally translate their own L1 equivalent idiom. This promotes the sort of cognitive analytic activity which will help to build a separate store of L2 idioms linked by meaning associations to the much richer L1 store. All students will benefit from the realisation that different languages may use different conceptual metaphors.

For less advanced classes the task can be facilitated by means of line drawings of the idioms' underlying metaphor which students first have to match to the appropriate idiom. Next, they may match idiom and drawing to a jumbled list of definitions which the teacher has prepared.

For even weaker classes some vestige of cognitive activity can still be maintained while employing a rather spoon-feeding method of presentation. Exercise B is an example of this (using different idioms). Here, students do not even have to match idioms to a jumbled list of definitions. The idiom is followed by its definition, but a key word is missing. Key words are presented separately in jumbled order and the exercise operates on a cloze principle. This exercise is suitable for individual work. Experience has shown me that the idioms are better retained in this way than if they had merely been presented with definitions already complete.

Exercise B

Task: 1. Complete the blanks below with the correct word. Use each word only once.

2. Do you have equivalent idioms in your language for any of these meanings? "Translate" your native idioms into English. See if the person next to you understands.

Don't count your chickens before they are hatched.

This means: DON'T BE OVER- -----

He is like a bull in a china shop.

This means: HE IS VERY- -----

His bark is worse than his bite

This means HE IS ----- THAN HE LOOKS.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

This means: THERE IS SOME ----- IN EVERY BAD EVENT.

Hold your horses.

This means: ----- A MOMENT.

She is down in the dumps.

This means: SHE IS -----

He couldn't keep a straight face.

This means: HE COULDN'T KEEP HIS FACE -----

WORDS: good, clumsy, kinder, optimistic, serious, depressed, wait.

Comment: Task 1 is best done individually. In Task 2 the opportunity is  
provided for pair work in the multilingual class. Afterwards results can be compared in plenum concerning those idioms, which are comprehensible when "translated" into English from various.

Exercise C

Task: Express the underlined sections of the following text with  
language which expresses the same meaning more or less.

Example: I was feeling a bit down in the dumps - I was feeling a bit depressed

I was feeling a bit down in the dumps because it was raining cats and dogs, so I went to see Bill. Bill drinks like a fish because his work drives him up the wall. He is an EFL teacher. But he would never leave you in the lurch. Today I found him like a cat on hot bricks because he was bored. We decided to kill two birds with one stone by going to the pub and the launderette. We had a bone to pick with the barman in any case because he had forgotten to reserve the dartboard for us the previous day. We decided that not to go to the pub in protest would be just cutting off our noses to spite our faces. We did not want to make a mountain out of a molehill either.

Comment: This exercise is best done in groups. Learners should be encouraged to use the context for meaning clues rather than puzzling over the surface meaning of the idiomatic units devoid of context. The passage has been deliberately contrived to provide lots of semantic clues: for example, if it is raining one tends to feel depressed rather than elated, and one is more likely to feel depressed if it is raining heavily rather than lightly. Again, the "two" birds with one stone are picked up by the two nouns "pub" and "launderette". For this reason, another approach to the exercise would be for the teacher to take the class through the reasoning processes by which meaning may be inferred from context by paying attention to anaphoric, cataphoric and exophoric reference.

Exercise D

Task 1): Arrange these proverbial expressions into pairs of opposite  (or at least "near opposite"!) meaning:

1) No man is an island

2) Necessity is the mother of invention

3) Spend and God will send

4) The more, the merrier

5) We are ships that pass by night

6) He who hesitates is lost

7) You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear

8) Many hands make light work

9) Too many cooks spoil the broth

10) Fools seldom differ

11) Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise

12) A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush

13) Look before you leap

14) Great minds think alike

15) Two's company, three's a crowd

16) A man's reach should exceed his grasp

17) Look after the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves

18) We can't go through life with our heads buried in the sand

(Answers are: 1 & 5, 2 & 7, 3 & 17, 4 & 15, 6 & 13, 8 & 9, 10 & 14, 11  & 18, 12 & 16)

Task 2): For each of the following two proverbs find a proverb in the  
above list which is very similar to it in meaning?

19) Faint heart never won fair maid

20) Fools rush in where angels fear to tread

(Answers are: 19 & 16, 20 & 13)

Comment: This exercise is again best done in small groups or pairs. Learners should be encouraged to look for "easy" pairs first, rather than going through the list one by one. Sometimes the lexical items are clues to the contrasting pairs (e.g. 1 & 5, where "ship" and "island" function as mutual clues and cues). The exercise can be made less demanding by the teacher prompting and helping the learners in this way. Sometimes the lexical link is not quite so obvious, but nevertheless can be uncovered (e.g. 4 & 15, where "two, three" cue "more"). Note, how "fools" in 10 contrasts with "great minds" in 14, whereas within 20 the contrast is between "fools" and "angels", a contrast which may not be at all obvious to all learners, involving as it does what Leech calls "historical meaning" of the word "angel". Learners should be encouraged to puzzle over this and access their world knowledge, but the teacher must ultimately be prepared to provide elucidation. It is less important how many of the pairs learners get right than that they get to grips with the detailed semantics of these proverbial expressions, becoming conscious of both literal surface meaning of the individual parts and the total metaphorical meaning of the expression. In this respect reference to how L1 expresses the same ideas may be helpful. A tolerant attitude to some "second best solutions" should be adopted by the teacher. For instance, 1 and 18 could also go together as opposites, and this solution is rejected only because 11 and 5 form a poor pair of opposites. This exercise can be used as a point of departure for discussion in various directions, and has certainly been far from exhausted when the tasks listed above have been done. The exercise thus provides a lead-in to these literary texts, excerpts from which could be read to show how the expression was first used. Experience proves that if such expressions are not to go in one ear and out the other, then intensive work of this nature is necessary. It is interesting to uncover the basic image underlying these expressions which in some cases is not obvious, for example, the ostrich in 18, the metaphorical force of "mother" and the sense of "invention" (i.e. "initiative", "inventiveness") in 2.

I would like to offer one final exercise to show how the metaphor approach towards idiomatic language may be extended to teaching vocabulary more generally, not only to firmly fixed idioms. The point I wish to make is that certain lexical fields can be applied to various contexts in a way which is not always realised. It is in this way that words acquire a range of meaning, even if the proficient language user is not aware of this, precisely because the given non-linguistic context already delimits his or her meaning expectations for various lexical items. Situational and communicative approaches to language teaching often stop short of showing how vocabulary learned for a particular context can be reapplied in others, although this is what is continually being done in language use, for example, as mentioned above, when the economy is discussed in terms of the lexis of sickness and health.

The following example exercise would be intended as a follow-up to a comprehension passage done in the previous lesson and seeks to activate the slumbering vocabulary recently encountered. It takes the vocabulary of emotion as used in a passage from a novel dealing with the death of a young boy, and places it in a very different context, namely a football match. Cognitive effort is thus required by the learners to lift vocabulary out of one context, perceive its semantic characteristics and apply it appropriately in another context. Below is a condensed version of the comprehension passage.

Comprehension Passage to precede Exercise E

It was about three weeks after my little brother had died. Barely were we all sitting together in the living room when my mother and aunts began talking about Edward. At first their voices were subdued, but gradually they rose as the women became more and more excited, and the words came flooding out. "Yes," cried my Aunt Lucy and my mother in chorus. He was too good to stay with us, too good. He was a saint!" Carried away by their own emotion, they became almost ecstatic in their exaggerated utterances. I sat there very quiet and afraid, I too was carried away by the emotion; I felt feverish and my eyes grew moist. My father was perfectly still. Once in a while I glanced at him. He looked very upset and he didn’t join in the conversation. I knew there was going to be an incident. The tension mounted. Suddenly he rose to his feet. His eyes flashed violently.

"Stop it," he said, and real anger was in his voice. "Stop talking about him like that. He wasn't a saint; he was just an ordinary boy, guilty of wrong like anyone else, and I won't have you talk about him like that." The underlined words represent those that will be required in the following exercise. To what extent the teacher would single these out for pupils and focus attention on them is up to him or her and the level and ability of the class in question. Of course, there are other vocabulary items pertaining to emotion in the passage (e.g. "moist", "flashed", which it has not been possible to incorporate into the exercise. This is in the nature of things if the following contrived passage is to be both short and reasonably natural.

Exercise E

Task 1): Fill in the blanks in the passage below with the underlined words and phrases from the passage above. Use each word or phrase once only. You may change the morphological form of words (e.g. tense and aspect of verbs, number of nouns) or the grammatical class (e.g. you may make a noun from a verb or an adjective from an adverb etc.).

(The passage is presented below with the blanks completed)

Once in a while I go to see a football match. Last Saturday I joined the thousands of fans flooding into St. James's Park to watch Newcastle United play Leeds United. I arrived two minutes before kick-off, so I was barely in time. The first few minutes of play were rather subdued, but then the tension mounted, the crowd cried out in chorus, and, carried away by the emotion, I joined in. Soon Newcastle was feverishly attacking the Leeds goal. The Newcastle fans became almost ecstatic when their team scored. However, the goal was disallowed. This upset the Newcastle fans, who believed the referee had been guilty of showing favoritism, and there were some violent crowd incidents as angry fans ran onto the pitch.

Comment: As a further exercise for an advanced class learners could be asked to continue the football passage for themselves, trying to use some more vocabulary items from the original passage.

Alternatively they could be asked to paraphrase the vocabulary items used for both passages as follows: half the class would paraphrase the vocabulary as used in the original comprehension passage, and half as used in the football passage. This will underline for learners how the same words actually mean very different things in the two passages, but that there is a unifying common thread of meaning between them in the two contexts; For example, "upset" in the original passage means something like "deeply grieved", "near to tears with grief", "sad and angry". In the football passage it means (as a verb) "to annoy", "to irritate", "to exasperate". Note also the difference between "to feverishly attack a goal" and "to feel feverish", between a "violent incident" and "eyes flashed violently". Learners should be alerted to the processes of metaphor and metonymy at work here, for these are the processes by means of which the proficient language user finds words  
for thought, and which we as teachers usually expect our learners.