Language personality of his Holiness Patriarch Cyril: Translation problems (case study of the book of homilies The Mystery of Metanoia/La Conversion au Royaume de Dieu)

The article deals with the study of the "language personality" of His Holiness Patriarch Cyril and the problems connected with its expression in translation at the semantic, cognitive and pragmatic levels. The research is based on the book of homilies The Mystery of Metanoia and its translation into French (La Conversion au Royaume de Dieu) done by hieromonk Alexandre (Siniakov). The analysis of the homilies allowed to identify the key discursive strategies used by Patriarch Cyril. The authors identified them both at the macrotextual level (use of different types of discourse, intertextuality, stylistic variety) and lexical level (use of specialized terms, compound words, borrowings from Church Slavonic and archaisms). The comparison of the texts in Russian and in French revealed the structural changes made by the translator and the main techniques, which include the use of the borrowings from Greek, compensation, lexical addition and omission as well as modulation. The analysis allowed to highlight the key parametres, which determine the Patriarch's individual style, and to describe the main transformations ensuring their rendering in the target language.