A catalogue of colour terms: principles of selection and structure

Author of the article motivates the principles of the formation of the catalogue of colour terms in the Russian language which can serve as an effective tool of pre-translation analysis while translating foreign texts into Russian.

The article contains the basis of the principle of vocabulary retrieval from lexicographic sources based on the semantic principles that prove to be significant for translation; the necessity of etymological analysis of the analysed word; the consideration of figurative meanings and connotations.

The author explains the choice of the number of dictionaries used for the cataloguing, reasons the necessity of using national text corpora, literary fiction and lexicographic research aimed at colour terms analysis and demonstrates examples of vocabulary description from the catalogue.

Twelve basic colour terms are chosen as hypernyms and compose twelve semantic fields. The principles of hyponyms identification established by the author reason the choice of the vocabulary for the catalogue, but the semantic fields are purposefully open and can be equipped with more hyponyms extracted from the historical texts or formed in the process of word formation in the language. The author shows the principle giving an example of the semantic field of the white colour and showing the outline of the analysis of the colour terms алебастровый / alabaster showing the steps of the catalogue entry formation.

In the course of the research were used following methods: definitional, componential and etymological analyses, which helped to thoroughly explore all the significant features of the colour terms in the Russian language.

The research has a pragmatic scope and can be used while translating into Russian colour terms of different languages.