Lesia Ukrainka in the Global Information Space: Case-Study of the Audio Guide Creation for the Lesia Ukrainka Museum

Abstract

The article describes two practice-oriented translation projects carried out
jointly by the Department of Applied Linguistics and the Lesia Ukrainka Museum of
the Lesia Ukrainka Volyn National University in 2021. The purpose of the
publication is to introduce the scientific community to the process of compiling an
English-language audio guide for the Lesia Ukrainka Museum, and to analyze the
difficulties and advantages of such tasks as part of applied linguists and translators
comprehensive training. We believe that today Lesia Ukrainka's works and biography
are represented in the global information space insufficiently, although the
universality of the topics and the biography of the writer are of great interest to the
global audience. Lesia Ukrainka spoke many languages, translated and popularized
European literature in Ukraine, and her texts combine unique national themes with
eternal and global ones. The first project involved creating a Wikipedia article about
the drama-feerie «Forest Song» in English. The students involved in its
implementation used the already existing translation of Percival Cundy. Their main
task was to structure the article according to the requirements of Wikipedia and add
sources, illustrations and links. The second project, the work on the compiling of an
English-language audio guide for the Lesia Ukrainka Museum, was much more
complex and large-scale. It combined several stages: starting from the adaptation of
the text to its recording by a native English speaker. The project united the efforts of
Tetyana Danyliuk-Tereshchuk, director of the Lesia Ukrainka Museum, masters of
applied linguistics under the guidance of prof. Biskub Iryna and Douglas O’Brien, a
teacher and native English speaker. In the process of translation of the tour text, many
grammatical and lexical-semantic transformations were carried out. Proper names
were among the most difficult to translate, and cultural realities needed adaptation for
the global English-speaking audience unfamiliar with the Ukrainian cultural context.