The syntagmatic meaning of the imperfect and options for its translation from French into Russian

Abstract

The aim of the study is to identify the primary ways of translating the French ‘imparfait’ into Russian. The article examines the correspondence between tense forms as a means of expressing qualitative and quantitative aspectual and temporal meanings – specifically duration and relevance. The research is based on data from a French-Russian parallel corpus. Scientific novelty lies in the first-ever systematic classification of both translation variants and the corresponding semantic factors that determine the choice of a specific form during translation. By situating an event within the past, the ‘imparfait’ implies a situation that is incomplete and ongoing, bounded only by the present moment. The study reveals that, in translation, the French ‘imparfait’ most frequently corresponds to the Russian imperfective past tense. In contexts describing actual situations – whether by specifying the background or by indicating observable physical actions – the ‘imparfait’ is translated using imperfective present or past forms, or the perfective past form, depending crucially on the verb’s telicity (boundedness). In contexts describing non-actual characteristics associated with an action, preference is given to the imperfective past and, less frequently, the imperfective present.