DIMINUTIVES: INTERLINGUAL ASYMMETRY AND TRANSLATION (A STUDY OF THE NOVELLA “HEART OF A DOG” BY MIKHAIL BULGAKOV AND ITS TRANSLATIONS INTO FRENCH, ENGLISH AND CHINESE LANGUAGES)
Diminutives are found in many literary works created in Russian and they are an important means of sense-making. They also play an important role in creating a speech portrait of a character as well as in expressing the author's assessment. There is a legitimate question due to a frequent use of diminutives in literary works: how to translate fragments of a literary text where diminutive suffixes are found? Do these passages require special attention and do they need a pre-translation comment? Is the diverse palette of meanings that writers put into words with diminutive suffixes understandable to people of a different culture? In this article, we will consider fragments of text with diminutives taken from the novella “Heart of a Dog” by Mikhail Bulgakov, and their translations into English, French and Chinese, we will try to determine what difficulties a translator faces in working on such texts.