Articles

The present paper deals with changing priorities in the 21st century Russian literary translation in terms of translation strategy. Prerequisites and results of such an axiological transformation are considered. The Russian translation of Goethe’s Faust by V.E. Prieb serves as the main illustrative material.

The article presents the essentials of the author’s conception of Business English which is further elaborated to introduce and account for the author’s approach to translation for business purposes as based on the key concepts, methodological principles and translation techniques that are at the core of spoken and written business communication across cultures.

The article deals with five Russian translation poetic variants of Emily Dickinson’s poem We never know how high we are within the framework of cognitive translation practice. It sheds light on similarities and differences in textual subjectification and subjective modality means in the source and target poetic texts alike. It has been shown that the perception and conceptual planes from the cognitive metaphor in the adjective high высокий are preserved in translation. The Speaker’s viewpoint might shift entailing changes in the means of subjective modality, such as personal deictic forms, verbal deictic changes in voice and grammatical modality as well. Russian variants of translation containing syntactic forced restructuring under meaning contraction are considered as a style modifying device.

The article deals with five Russian translation poetic variants of Emily Dickinson’s poem We never know how high we are within the framework of cognitive translation practice. It sheds light on similarities and differences in textual subjectification and subjective modality means in the source and target poetic texts alike. It has been shown that the perception and conceptual planes from the cognitive metaphor in the adjective high высокий are preserved in translation. The Speaker’s viewpoint might shift entailing changes in the means of subjective modality, such as personal deictic forms, verbal deictic changes in voice and grammatical modality as well. Russian variants of translation containing syntactic forced restructuring under meaning contraction are considered as a style modifying device.

The article focuses on some distinctive features of public speeches in Chinese in their close connection with and influence on the very process of simultaneous interpretation from Chinese into Russian. Due to the syllabic word structure, unique rhythm, speed and other factors the Chinese language has unprecedented information density and lack of language redundancy, both negatively affecting simultaneous interpretation. The article also gives some practical recommendations on how to make better listening, understanding and interpreting in Chinese and get the old and new information in oral Chinese text.

One hundred years ago, the publishing house World Literature published a concise study guide for beginning literary translators featuring two articles authored by two Russian masters of literary translation — Korney I. Chukovsky and Nikolay S. Gumilyov — The Principles of Literary Translation which laid the foundations for a comprehensive literary translation theory.

The study guide can be regarded as the first theoretical work of its kind in the history of Russia’s translation studies. It absorbed many years of translation practice of the aforementioned masters’ predecessors. Chukovsky and Gumilyov put forward a number of ideas and guidelines that still hold and can be used to develop a modern educational system of training literary translators. In their articles, both authors put emphasis on the linguistic aspect of works of fiction and, consequently, that of translation praxis in the field of literary endeavor.

This article completes the thematic cycle “On the ‘hermeneutic turn’ in the modern theory and methodology of translation” and “Hermeneutic-translational methodological standard in the mirror of transdisciplinarity,” performed within the framework of the new research field at the Higher School of Translation aimed at theoretical understanding and practical introduction of hermeneutic strategies and tactics in the modern translation process. It was found that translational reflection reduces the assimilation of a translate to the original by successively explicit or implicit implementation of four basic cognitive constants: pre-understanding, understanding, interpretation and translation decision. The last one is the essence of the conceptually optimal variant of the method and form of a discursively equivalent / adequate assimilation of the translate to the original, rationally acceptable for a given text type and its functional and stylistic genre. The plurality of translation decisions concerning the same source text objectively depends on the given interlingual situation of goal-setting and the way the translation text is linked to a certain category of recipients or the translator’s subjective intentions.

This article is about decision-making in translation. The author makes an attempt to apply the dual processes theory, developed by D. Kahneman, to describing decision-making in translation. The experiment conducted within the framework of our research made it possible to draw conclusions about different types of thinking peculiar to different types of translation decisions, as well as about the levels at which these decisions are made.

The article studies the diachronic aspect of French equestrian terminology, which is characterized by the historical side of the emergence of terms related to the sport.  e author explains the concept of terminology (equestrian in particular) while focusing on the chronology of equestrian terms in French.

A prose poem in the literary form combines the characteristics of both poem and prose. However, it is still different from either of these. Therefore, compared to translation of poem and prose, the method of translation from Russian into Chinese is special. This article discusses the literariness of translation of prose poems from Russian into Chinese, including the strategy of combining the replacement of the foot with the dou with the replacement of the foot with a logical pause in the line, as well as the method of working with the syntax structure to preserve the original literariness. The article is based on a comparative analysis of three translation versions of “Song of The Stormy Petrel” by Maxim Gorky.

The article is a comparison of three Russian translations of the Chinese book “San Zi Jing.” These are different translations of the same text made in different periods of the 18^th century: the reign of Peter the Great, the 1740’s and the late 1770’s. There are many differences among them, and these differences reflect the evolution of translation practice in Russia in the 18^th century.

A fundamentally new type of person living in the 1860s, society’s disillusions and social transformations were described psychologically truly and in detail by a great Russian writer Ivan S. Turgenev. Vivid and rich in detail, character descriptions in the novels reflected the features and depth of the Russian literary language, becoming for many subsequent years a model for writing texts of this format not only in Russian literature, but also abroad, including China. A large number of translations of texts by Ivan S. Turgenev into Chinese abound in linguistic material, revealing the peculiarities of translators’ work. At the same time, the complexity and a certain number of different kinds of transformations used by the translators of Turgenev’s texts from Russian into Chinese are due to the lexical and grammatical features of these two languages, as well as the personal position of the translator and pragmatic aspects. Thus, translation transformations are to a certain extent present in almost all translations. The study of examples of transformations in translations of Ivan S. Turgenev’s works is of interest not only to linguists and translators, but also to scholars involved in cultural studies. The present article discusses some translation transformations used in Chinese translations of Ivan S. Turgenev’s novels “Rudin” and “Fathers and Children”, taking into account various peculiarities of the Chinese language.

The 47-year activities of the American missionary of the liberal party, Lin Lezhi, is associated with the period of changesin the era of the Qing dynasty. He took an active part in those changes whileplaying an important role in translating Western scientific works. With a clear goal and special strategies, he spread the advanced cultures and thoughts ofthe West and thus affectedChina in many ways. Many translated works still have an indelible significance. Lin Lezhi is a distinguished American missionary translator who preached in China. Any studies of the history of translation in the era of the Qing Dynasty would be incomplete without mentioning Lin Lezhi.

The realities of the translation process as components of the systemic relations include the situation of communication within which the translator mediates the author’s communication with a foreign reader, the original text as an object of transformation into the translated text and interaction of the translated text with the actual reality which is described in the original text and is reproduced in the translated one. The realities of the translation process manifest their qualities most visibly by bearing the peculiarity of the mediated communication, i.e. communication with the translator’s participation. The peculiarity of the communication situation for the translator is that he must find ways of expressing what does not have analogues in the target language. The most vivid elements of the surrounding reality, characteristic of the original text, manifest themselves in foreign-language realities which may not have equivalents in the target language. By achieving the accuracy of the translation, the translator focusses his efforts on making the foreign-language realities understandable to the translation recipient.

This article pays attention to the use of the Internet in the process of translation, viz. the use of different online sources: search engines, machine translations, Wikipedia, reference sites, online correсtion, etc. The Internet is a great supporting tool that can help translators in their work. The ability to use the Internet can be considered as any translator’s key skill.