Low-quality Kazakh language due to translation: reasons and solutions

Zhannura Manapbayeva, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Almaty, Kazakhstan, ID CLEaR2017-450;     Abstract:           Despite Kazakh being the state language of Kazakhstan, Russian is the first language of the most of the population. According to the results of the recent survey, 54.7% of the respondents use Russian in their families, 34% of the respondents don’t speak Kazakh at all, and only 23.7% of the respondents use Kazakh at work. Due to the state language policy, Kazakh is becoming more popular, but its quality is poorer. Almost all the texts in Kazakh are translated from Russian, and the translations are full of mistakes. Legal documents, TV advertisements, and even lyrics are full of incorrect word collocations, as they are translated word-to-word without taking into consideration the Kazakh picture of the world. Most people prefer reading the Russian text to Kazakh, as the latter is not understandable. Due to these problems, there is a risk of losing the initial Kazakh language, and getting the so-called ‘shala Kazakh’ (=raw Kazakh), the term often used about the Kazakhs, who use the language incorrectly. In order to solve the problem we suggest compiling a comprehensive collocations dictionary of the Kazakh language.

Key words: low-quality translation, collocations dictionary, incorrect collocations, Kazakh, Russian