Neologisms-blends in Modern English fashion industry discourse: structural and translation aspects

Abstract

The article under consideration focuses on neologisms which abound in the fashion industry discourse. An enormous number of new words in this industry are of a compelling interest to linguists, though, paradoxically, these lexemes appear to be practically unknown to scholars. As a rule, new words in the fashion industry, especially blends, cause challenges in translation. Hence, the author’s main objective was to reveal the structural and semantic features of new lexemes created by blending, that is by combining two other words into one. The paper provides structural classification of blends based on the order of shortened elements, interlinks and overlaps to facilitate adequate decoding. Total, partial and overlapping telescopic words were singled out and analysed accordingly. Insight into semantics of these words enabled to construct the most common taxa, among which are lexico-semantic groups 'clothes', 'footwear', 'accessories', 'beauty', 'fashion industry', 'style', 'beauty imperfections', 'trendy color', etc., represented by blends. Such blends, or telescopic words, constantly appear in the sphere of fashion and assign a formidable task to a translator. Thus, the main lexical, grammatical, lexico-grammatical transformations applied in the translation of blends are described. The results indicate that transcribing, transliteration, adaptive transcoding and explication, or the combination of them, are the most common transformations. But in the course of the research several other methods of transferring the meaning of blends were identified, namely loan translation, the creation of new blends, zero translation, omission and transposition. Profound research of fashion industry neologisms remains relevant as the process of nomination goes on.