Abstract

This combination of philological and linguoculturological analysis is an extremely powerful tool for the analysis of the transfer, modification, and recontextualization of the idiomatic expressions in modern novels, especially in those that travel between linguistic and cultural spaces by means of digital networks, translation services, and the internet. In this paper the theoretical underpinnings of both fields are examined in a systematic way and it is suggested that the methodological integration of the two fields has shown to provide a better and more contextually informed understanding of idiomatic meaning making, than either approach is able to provide individually. This study is based on a corpus of 10 contemporary novels from the three language traditions of English, Arabic, and Russian to analyses the fate of culture-bound idiomatic units in the interlingual and intercultural transfer processes in the light of the Dual Philological-Linguocultural Model (DPLM). This study addresses two research questions: how etymological transparency and cultural connotation density affect idiomatic transfer, and how internet-mediated translation environments influence transfer outcomes. The function of the Internet is considered as a new mediator, such as the digital translation engines, online literary communities, and multilingual e-publishing platforms. A structured comparative framework and qualitative discourse analysis are applied to evaluate the transferability of the three categories of idioms: conceptual, somatic and historical-mythological. Quantitative analysis includes inter-annotator agreement testing and regression-based examination of the relationship between DPLM variables and transfer outcomes. Results validate the importance of the Linguacultural anchoring as significant predictor of difficulty in transfer and of philological etymological attention for its explanatory value. The paper presents a typological model of the transfer outcomes with five categories and presents suggestions for digital era translators, digital humanities scholars and NLP researchers.