REFLECTION OF THE MEDIEVAL REALITY IN MODERN ENGLISH TRANSLATION (A CASE STUDY OF GEOFFREY CHAUCER’S “MILLER’S TALE”)

Abstract

The paper researches how medieval English reality of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale” is brought across to the present-day reader in modern English translation. The author singles out some major reality-building constituents that make up the world of the famous story and looks at how the translator handles them in terms of the lexicon. Such reality-building constituents include locale markers; common practices characterizing people’s life in a medieval English town; people’s beliefs; household details; characters’ individual appearances, courting and love-making, etc. The study showed a number of challenges posed by the intricate realism and bawdy farce of “The Miller’s Tale” for the modern translator both in terms of words’ meaning and functional status. In addition to difficulties resulting from the significant time distance between the original text and the modern English reader, the translator of “The Miller’s Tale” faces the problem of language “propriety” in rendering explicit vocabulary relating to sex and physiological functions.