Articles

Ryurik Konstantinovich Minyar-Beloruchev (1922–2000) was one of the most famous Soviet and Russian scholars and of the founders of the general theory of translation. He laid the theoretical basis for interpretation and devised methods of teaching consecutive and simultaneous interpretation. His numerous works, based on his rich personal experience, research, teaching and experimental work, have become a model to follow in the field of interpretation studies and practical training of interpreters.

Due to the high demand for interpretation in the modern world, MinyarBeloruchev’s works deserve a close study not only by Russian interpretation researchers and educators, but also by experts from other countries. Currently, research into the interpretation theory in China is still at the initial stage of its development, and the need for highly qualified interpreters in China is constantly growing. Chinese researchers should study the theory developed by Ryurik K. Minyar-Beloruchev when setting up training programs for interpreters in China.

The article describes various aspects of military interpreters’ work during the Great Patriotic War. The author shows the specifics of speech in a military environment and the conditionality of speech behavior of a military personnel as determined by the nature of combat tasks that they perform.

The article reveals the types of activities of any military interpreter depending on the features of the military organization of units and formations, as well as the uniqueness of the conditions in which the military personnel operate.

The author emphasizes the need for special language training and stresses the role of the Military Institute of Foreign Languages (MIFL) in the training of military interpreters during the war. It would have been impossible to start fighting without translators who not only spoke the enemy’s language, but also knew its military machine, who were able to navigate freely in captured documents, gain information from radio traffic and influence the enemy’s troops and population. The successful preparation and conduct of operations ultimately depended on those officers’ language skills.

The paper deals with the study of the military-political discourse (MPD) as a state-institutional, hybrid-multivector communicative phenomenon of a functionally multi-purpose mission — military doctrinal, political-diplomatic, military-journalistic (informational and propaganda), military-commercial, military-educational, etc. It states an unprecedented use on the international arena by representatives of power structures of a number of NATO member countries in the media and oral rhetoric of discursive games of a substandard style with the goal of insulting, humiliating and ridiculing an opponent-recipient at the level of a deviant-profane usus using an invective, obscene vocabulary, offensive paralinguistic means, etc. The author analyzes the professional activities of the translator in the field of military-political communication as a civil servant in the Armed Forces sector on the scale of the pan-European standard for working languages with the index C₁ / C₂ using the example of inter-lingual mediation in the field of military journalism.

The article describes the uncompromising verbal struggle against Nazism that simultaneous interpreters waged at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial (1945–46) regardless of considerable emotional strain and the psychological pressure exerted on them by some defendants and the counsel every so often. The interpreters defied the odds and emerged victorious. Excerpts from the memoirs authored by some of the key participants in the Trial of Six Million Words are provided.

The 75th anniversary of the Soviet people’s victory in the Great Patriotic War once again brings us back to the events of that time and makes us think again about the impact of the war not only on various aspects of human society, the economy, politics and technology, but also on the human consciousness, man’s language and speech activity.

During any war, the cognitive and communicative system that provides communication in the military sphere is being refined and developed. Inter-language communication and translation take on peculiar forms in the context of a military confrontation between “us” and “them.”

The Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War expanded the range of social functions of the Russian language. It became the language of international cooperation, including that in the military sphere, which gave a major boost to translation activities, as well as the development of translation theory and methodology.

The article focuses on some aspects of conveying meanings of the category of number when translating legal English terms from various fields of the law into Russian. The examples given are illustrative of the variability in grammatical forms of the singular and the plural which denote similar or identical terminological meanings. Translation correspondences for English legal terms and terminological expressions cited from specialized bilingual dictionaries indicate the importance of taking into account the semantics of singularity and plurality in legal translation. The article accentuates the variability of grammatical forms used by legal English and legal Russian to convey the meanings of number and frequent discrepancies of those forms in translation.

The article describes the key cognitive mechanisms of conference interpreting: inferencing, probabilistic forecasting/anticipation and compression built up in the course of an efficiently organized training which focuses on the development of communicative, extra-linguistic and specialized competences. The article explores a complex interaction of the mechanisms in question and their dependence on the level of mastery of professional competences by a simultaneous interpreter, which enables him/her to infer sense. Sense inferring and implicatures depend on the context. For example, the language and referential implicatures can be inferred from the language structures of the interpreted source text and its discursive elements (a narrow context), while the cognitive thesaurus-based implicatures related to extra-linguistic information of the text are derived from the broad pragmatic context. Implicatures, in their turn, are contingent on presuppositions that are also characterized in the article. Theoretic premises and conclusions are illustrated by interesting examples from the practice of conference interpreting.

The article presents a comparative analysis of the lexical content of the Russian, English and German versions of the MacArthur questionnaire, one of the diagnostic tools of speech development of younger children. Bilingual children’s language picture of the world, as well as language reflection in such children, is researched based on a comparison of various questionnaires. As a result, it is concluded that the language picture of the world of bilingual children is formed on the basis of a “stronger” language at a given point in time, expanding due to the second language, and language reflection in bilingual children often occurs earlier than in monolingual children, first in their “stronger” language.

The article considers a philosophical concept of Wilhelm von Humboldt about the untranslatability of poetry. According to the thought of the outstanding thinker and philosopher, the birth of a poetical composition is a mysterious process which transforms the sensual into the rational, the unconscious into the conscious, ethics (external) into aesthetics (interior), and up to the top of aesthetics, viz. the poetry he called “the law of the highest sensuality.” Poetry is beauty. Any poetic composition is untranslatable because the reverse process from the rational to the sensual, the conscious to the unconscious, aesthetics to ethics is impossible, for the law of highest sensuality is primarily the ancient first-born beginning of the people, “the spirit of the nation,” which can only be expressed by a poet belonging to the nation.

This article is devoted to the study of cognitive semantics and semantic features of the missing structure. In the course of the study, a definition of the basic mechanism of the appearance, functioning and disappearance of the missing structure in the superconscious field is given. The significance of the transfer of metacodes and lexicodes through short-term self-destruction of a structure can be traced in the analysis of both literary text and various styles of speech. This significance is not represented by individual elements of the system (in a word, phrase, sentence, etc.), but by a constantly varying unit, however, different from an idiolect, where only numerous deviations do not allow an individual language to arise. This confirms the practical significance of the study: by revealing the most significant concepts that have a value aspect and releasing its conceptual content at the time of the formation of the missing structure, we can determine: the nature of compliance or non-compliance with linguistic norms (clarity, logic, accuracy, correctness of speech), the direction of argumentation, the specifics of thesauri of subjects of communicative interaction, as well as the presence or absence of lexical and semantic barriers to communication. It is also possible to trace the stylistic separation of the language vocabulary into the book and colloquial, as well as distinguish the categories of each, namely: for book vocabulary—terminological, poetic and category of historicisms, and for colloquial—colloquial, dialectic and phraseological. Having examined the tokens of the concept in this way, its entire value with respect to the historical period is revealed. Given the methodology of Umberto Eco, we combine the diachronic approach with the theory of local civilizations of Arnold J. Toynbee and the unconscious theory of Sigmund Freud, which allows us to connect the specifics of the appearance of the missing structure with the category of frames in cognitive linguistics.

The article deals with four Russian translations of Emily Dickinson’s poem “Tell All the Truth but Tell it Slant” in line with the cognitive translation practice. It aims at similarities and differences in deictic, referential, conceptual, perceptual and gradation-evaluation areas of the source text and its translation variants. It has been shown that differences in the source and target texts, as well as the need to use transformations, are invoked by poetic syntactic license in the source text (double syntactic constructions and referential conflict), by key concepts “pravda — istina — truth” development, by the cognitive metaphor of light and novel dominating signs of cognition in the perception-gradation rows in the texts.