Culture-Specific Terms: Linguistic Realities in the Architecture and Construction Terminology of German

The aim of this article is to present a system of culture-specific terms in the architecture and construction terminology of the German language, identify the nomenclature of the corresponding units, classify them, and determine techniques of translating them into Russian. The most important of these terms are the nomenclature of municipal and rural settlements, names of residential construction facilities and structural parts of buildings. Culture-specific terms-names of residential buildings-are divided into groups by the erection type, their relation to a neighbouring facility, degree of readiness, and level of energy consumption. Culture-specific terms-names of the main architectural and structural elements of buildings-include names of roofs, windows, doors, staircases, which constitute groups with names of architectural and structural parts, specifying their construction type. Such groups consist of: (a) names denoting constructions of architectural and structural elements of buildings, not present in the Russian architecture and construction tradition; (b) names denoting unknown modifications of constructions of architectural and structural elements of buildings, known to the Russian tradition. Group (a) is small and closed, it includes names of some historical constructions of windows, roofs, and staircases. Group (b) is larger. It can be supplemented with new units, when new culture-specific denotations and corresponding names for them, unknown in Russia, appear in the German-speaking regions. Some modifications of building element constructions, unknown in Russia, are being adopted. They become known to the Russian house-building and obtain Russian fixed names that are usually translated. Among German culture-specific architecture and construction terms, there are those adopted by the Russian language and those that are not. For the former there are ready Russian equivalents. Unfamiliar linguistic realities do not have fixed matches in the target language. A translator chooses a technique to render the meaning of culture-specific terms if it is an unfamiliar unit or if the dictionary match of the adopted German term is non-informative in the Russian professional communication. To render the meanings of such terminological units, the same translation techniques can be used that are employed in the translation of linguistic realities in fiction: borrowing, calque, transposition, adaptation, interpretation, or explanatory (descriptive) translation. All these techniques, except explanatory translation, have major limitations when applying them to culture-specific terms from architecture and construction.

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