THE LEVEL OF EQUIVALENCE OF THE ENGLISH IDIOMS IN THE MACEDONIAN TRANSLATION OF THE NOVEL “THE ARCHITECT’S APPRENTICE”

Abstract

This paper analyses the level of equivalence of the English idiomatic expressions in the novel “The Architect’s Apprentice” by Elif Safak, a Turkish-British writer, and their Macedonian translation equivalents. The motive for writing this paper arose from the fact that the novel “The Architect’s Apprentice” by Elif Shafak, initially written in English and later translated into many languages, including Macedonian, abounds in idioms and figurative phrases. These idioms, more than just linguistic expressions, are windows into a nation's culture, wisdom, tradition, and way of thinking. Hence, translating from the source into the target language is a great challenge.
The research was conducted on a corpus of sentences excerpted from the novel written in English and its Macedonian translation. Therefore, the comparative method is used to examine the excerpted examples in both languages, i.e., the idioms were compared based on the correspondence between their lexical form and meaning from the source language into the target language. English and Macedonian idioms were analysed using monolingual dictionaries, both online and printed editions. Hence, based on the fact that in the translation process, three degrees of equivalence can be achieved in the target language: full (direct), partial (approximate), and non-equivalence, the excerpted idioms were divided into three groups.