English-Latvian-Russian Equivalence of Proverbs that Contain the Names of Animals

CONCLUSION
Having done the research and written the paper “The English-Latvian-Russian Equivalence of Proverbs that Contain the Names of Animals” the author has come to the following conclusion.
There are different types of equivalence which can be achieved in the process of translation. Translation of phraseological units, to which proverbs belong, is a peculiar process because the best type of equivalence in this case is dynamic equivalence, which is rendering the effect of the utterance from one language into another. However, successful examples of the formal equivalence, or rendering the form and the idea of the utterance, can be also found among proverbs and their translation into other languages.
The analysis of the quantitative equivalence of proverbs in three different languages has shown that there can be several translations of one and the same proverb, however, a translator should be very attentive and better not use the approximate quantitative equivalents of proverbs in other languages, because these can be very misleading.
The cases of zero equivalence are very frequent while translating the proverbs that contain the names of animals from English into Latvian and Russian. On the one hand, in case of proverbs with equivalents the author has proved that an image of an animal can be sustained in the process of translation, though it can be another animal. On the other hand, in case of proverbs without any equivalents, the author has suggested that the image of an animal can be sacrificed, as well as idiomaticity of the utterance, in the process of translation. The thing is that a translator can always use a calque or a word-for-word translation, but proverbs translated in this way are at a high risk of being weird and unfamiliar to the target audience, so they will not be perceived as phraseological units. Therefore, the effect of a proverb will be lost. That is why the author suggests either to look for a phraseological equivalent without any image of an animal, or to use a paraphrase.
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