"JUDGE" AND "SUDYA" IN THE ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN LANGUAGES: IN SEARCH FOR TERMINOLOGICAL ADEQUACY

Due to the expansion of international cooperation in different fields the problem of terminological equivalency in translation is among the most important ones. This research is carried out within a framework of the comparative terminology studies and continues the analyses of the English and Russian lexemes denoting the core legal professions and their translation correspondences. The aim of the present article is to compare lexical and semantic fields of English 'judge' and Russian 'sudya' composed by the lexemes and lexical units containing the semantic element of 'an official, executing justice' in order to find out their similarities and differences and to search for translation equivalents of their constituent elements. The authors believe that in the rapidly changing world both the Russian practicing lawyers and their foreign counterparties, participating in many legal disputes must be aware of the terminology used in different jurisdictions to be able to compete. But to have highly qualified lawyers we need to prepare them now at law schools. The data for this work were taken from English and Russian bilingual dictionaries, definition dictionaries, specialized dictionaries, legal texts, and media, British National Corpus (BNC), Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and Russian National Corpus (RNC). The authors compare the quantity of the lexemes, forming the lexical and semantic fields under study, their semantic volume and analyse their differentiating features. The study implements definitive, distributive, context, contrastive and cultural analyses. The latter seems important these days because they enable to specify the semantics of the terms, their culture specific characteristics and to offer some recommendations on their translation. The analysis showed that within to the long history of Britain and its highly developed legal system the English lexical and semantic field "judge" is represented by a greater number of lexemes and lexical units, i.e. it has higher nominative density. English terms are characterized by nominative specification, territorial variation and polysemy. At the same time many Russian businesses prefer claiming the British courts, which means that not knowing the revealed differences create considerable difficulties in translation. They are also a source of confusion when dealing with a criminal court judge or a civil court arbitrator. The results of the research can be used in comparative terminology studies, in theory and practice of translation, in dictionary making, and mostly, in teaching professional legal English to law students.