Humour in modern English literature: methods of creation and features of translation

The purpose of the study is to determine the main ways and means of creating humour in a work of fiction in Modern English, which is the material for the present research, to analyze the ways of translating humour from English into Russian on the basis of specific examples taken from the selected modern English-language literary works. The main focus on humor analysis entails the need to conduct a semantic analysis of the content plane of individual lexical units and study coexistence of verbal and non-verbal means of communication within the framework of one or more sentences. The article focuses on hyperbolization and combination of different/opposite stylistic/semantic lexical units as the foundation for constructing a comic verbal description. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the choice of the material for analysis – a detective story “Her Royal Spyness” by Rhys Bowen, as well as in establishing the recurrent ways of creating humour and selecting translation devices in Modern English. As a result of the study, it was found that hyperbolization is the predominant way of building humour in the text, while compensation turns out to be the most popular method of translating from Modern English into Russian. The results of the study may be interesting for a wide range of philologists, linguists (cognitive linguistics can also be mentioned in this regard), and can also be useful from the point of view of teaching such disciplines of higher education as a practical course of translation from the English language into the Russian language, country studies through language.