Interpretation revisited: its impact on lsp-translation

Abstract

The article explores the cognitive nature of sense interpretation in translation and the role of translator/interpreter who reveals the sense meant by the sender of the source language (SL) message and conveys it in the target language (TL). The objective of the article is to study the interaction of competence and interpretation factors in translation. The tasks closely related to the objective are as follows: to identify linguistic and extralinguistic factors that bring about the need for interpreting the sense in the SL, to show the specifics of interpretation in the LSP-texts and to present the typology of translation difficulties that can be coped with by sense interpretation. The findings of the research have shown that the translator is capable of performing his/her professional tasks only if he/she has a mastery of professional translator competences — the communicative, extralinguistic and specialized ones that enable him/her to resort to the key cognitive mechanism of translation — inferencing — that serves as a basis for interpreting sense in translation. While grasping the meaning of the SL message, the translator moves from the reference to sense and derives inferences. When reverbalizing the sense in the target language in moving from the sense to reference, the translator generates implicatures targeted at the TL message recipient. Inferences and implicatures are based on the common presuppositional knowledge of the SL message sender, TL message recipient and the translator who has to perform the approximation or interactive alignment of this knowledge. The interactive alignment is possible if the translator is well-versed in the knowledge of presuppositions in the language and conceptual word view of both the source and target languages. There are two types of presuppositional knowledge: that of language structures related to interlanguage asymmetries, including discursive features of the text cohesion and coherence that are also linguo-specific and referents (that connect language to extralinguistic situations), and that related to the extralinguistic situation (encyclopedic information about the world around us, culture and specific domains of knowledge and respectively translation). The article also presents the typology of the key translation difficulties caused by the inter-language asymmetries, which result in the need to interpret the sense in the SL message and to formulate IT in the TL using its linguo-specifi c means. These translation difficulties are illustrated with interesting examples from the LSP-texts that need a special precision in translation quite frequently understood by any beginner translator as the need to preserve the expression form in the TL, which leads to word-for-word translation or transcoding. The understanding of the role of interpretation in translation of LSP-texts helps to observe the norms of TL style and usage while at the same time it makes it possible to render the meaning and sense of the SL as was meant by the message sender.

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