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Translator’s personality as a crucial factor in the rendering of author’s style (based on anglophone translations of Franko’s poem fairy-tale “Fox Mykyta”). Halyna Skira Ivan Franko National University in Lviv 1, Universytetska Str. Lviv, Ukraine Franko’s fairy-tales have been the focus of attention of the researchers Zakrevska, Tykholoz, Zorivchak, Kuzyk. The novelty of this research consists in singling out the factor of translator’s personality on the basis of English translations by Hnidj and Melnyk. The wandering motif Franko used in the poem fairy-tale may be traced in a number of ancient literatures (those of Babylon, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greek and Roman Literatures) and in individual authors’ artistic interpretations (by Goethe, Smazhevski and Franko). Name Mykyta, given to the sly fox, is found only in Polish and Ukrainian interpretations; in the latter the name carries out both nominative and significative functions (“Mykyta” means “smart, or even sly”). The tale presents a considerable difficulty for the translator because of the high level of its saturation with syntactic (rhythm melodic lingual features), lexical (Ukrainian realia, tell-tale names, dialectal vocabulary), idiomatic (idioms containing national and local colouring, as well as realia) and style peculiarities (laconic statements and generalized expressions that in Ukrainian have acquired the status of aphorisms), which each translator handles differently. The thorough analysis has shown that Melnyk’s translations render a higher degree of the original’s national colouring, he often calques the imagery and preserves symbolic value of the work, renders Ukrainian realia, transliterates geographic and proper names that in the translation function as exoticisms and make a reader aware of the fact he is reading the text belonging to a different culture. Hnidj’s translation strategy differs considerably. The translation is highly domesticated; the method most frequently used is that of finding equivalents in the target culture. The translator’s touch is also felt in frequent style shift for the sake of preserving humorous effect reached in the original by other means; absence of illustrations here (unlike both Melnyk’s translations with illustrations by Kurelek and Kozak) as well as the introduction of Latin and French words (not characteristic of the original) target this translation at adult readership with subtle artistic taste. KEYWORDS: translator’s artistic personality, national colouring, lingoustylistic analysis, style peculiarities of the work.


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