Tatiana S. Savvateeva

This article demonstrates the current situation in the field of literary translation from oriental languages into Russian, providing an overview of the translated works from Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Persian, Arabic, Indian and Kyrgyz literatures of different eras — from antiquity to the present — in terms of their content and volume. In addition, it highlights the specific features of literary and artistic translation from oriental languages. For example, much thought should be put into translation of the realities that characterize the oriental cultures: in particular, specific idioms and exoticisms. The question is raised as to how far the translation should deviate from the original: should the translator make his product interesting for the reader or should it be as close as possible to the original text in terms of content. The above examples of difficulties in literary translation allow to conclude that oriental literature is quite sophisticated in its presentation to the Russian reader, and yet these translations show increasing popularity.

The first part of this article is dedicated to the problem of correlation between the categories of modality and subjectivity. The notion of modality is one of the most debatable in linguistics. The scholars tend to define the field of modality by listing the varieties of the modality meanings and group them around several conceptual centers. This article provides a comparative overview of existing classifications of the types of modality, as well as gives a working definition of modality that suits the aims of the current research. The modal meanings express an assessment of the status of the situation in relation to the real world, a subjective assessment of the content of the statement by the speaker, as well as its communicative intention. Based on the ideas proposed by E. Paducheva, we consider that subjective-modal meanings are located on the intersection of two semantic fields — modality and egocentricity/subjectivity, which allows us to interpret modality as an egocentric category. The second part of this work justifies the relevance of studying subjective-modal meanings in colloquial Egyptian Arabic. The analysis of real language examples illustrates such problems as: compatibility of different types of modality in one statement, attributing the possibility and necessity to the sphere of subjective modality, as well as the question of expressing modality in Egyptian Arabic by grammatical means.