Lesia Ukrainka in the Global Information Space: Case-Study of the Audio Guide Creation for the Lesia Ukrainka Museum

The article describes two practice-oriented translation projects carried out jointly by the Department of Applied Linguistics and the Lesia Ukrainka Museum of the Lesia Ukrainka Volyn National University in 2021. The purpose of the publication is to introduce the scientific community to the process of compiling an English-language audio guide for the Lesia Ukrainka Museum, and to analyze the difficulties and advantages of such tasks as part of applied linguists and translators comprehensive training. We believe that today Lesia Ukrainka's works and biography are represented in the global information space insufficiently, although the universality of the topics and the biography of the writer are of great interest to the global audience. Lesia Ukrainka spoke many languages, translated and popularized European literature in Ukraine, and her texts combine unique national themes with eternal and global ones. The first project involved creating a Wikipedia article about the drama-feerie «Forest Song» in English. The students involved in its implementation used the already existing translation of Percival Cundy. Their main task was to structure the article according to the requirements of Wikipedia and add sources, illustrations and links. The second project, the work on the compiling of an English-language audio guide for the Lesia Ukrainka Museum, was much more complex and large-scale. It combined several stages: starting from the adaptation of the text to its recording by a native English speaker. The project united the efforts of Tetyana Danyliuk-Tereshchuk, director of the Lesia Ukrainka Museum, masters of applied linguistics under the guidance of prof. Biskub Iryna and Douglas O’Brien, a teacher and native English speaker. In the process of translation of the tour text, many grammatical and lexical-semantic transformations were carried out. Proper names were among the most difficult to translate, and cultural realities needed adaptation for the global English-speaking audience unfamiliar with the Ukrainian cultural context.