PECULIARITIES OF TRANSLATING METAPHORICAL LEXIS IN THE MUSICAL «MOLIÈRE, L’OPÉRA URBAIN»

Abstract

The article focuses on the analysis of the features of translating metaphorical lexis in the song texts of the French musical «Molière, l’opéra urbain» (2022) through a comparison of human and machine translation into Ukrainian. The relevance of the study is determined by the rapid development of neural machine translation systems and the need for a critical assessment of their capabilities and limitations in handling literary and song texts with a high degree of metaphorical density. The musical as a genre constitutes a specific type of creolized discourse in which verbal, musical, and rhythmic components form an inseparable unity, thereby significantly complicating the translation process and increasing the demands on the translator. The study examines the specificity of metaphor as a translation problem, identifies the types of metaphorical units found in the musical’s libretto, and analyzes the translation strategies used to render them. The research identifies four main types of metaphorical units: somatic, spatial-geographical, natural-philosophical, and sensory-perceptual metaphors. A comparative analysis of human and machine translation reveals fundamental differences in the strategies used to render metaphorical lexis. It has been established that machine translation predominantly relies on calquing and literal rendering of figurative units, which often results in stylistically unnatural and semantically opaque formulations in the target language. In contrast, human translation consistently aims to convey the figurative meaning and artistic effect of the original by employing functional translation, image transformation, and poetic adaptation. The analysis confirms that, despite significant technological advances in neural machine translation, the human translator remains indispensable when working with metaphorically rich texts.