Articles

The article deals with a study of the philosophical notion of antinomy applied to the theory of translation. A retrospective journey into the history of the issue is accompanied by an analysis of a number of antinomies most relevant to translation of proper names such as antinomy of identity and variation, antinomy of fixedness and arbitrariness, antinomy of the source and target language phonetic systems and that of outer form and inner meaning. In the analysis of antinomies of outer form and inner meaning, charactonyms and common names are differentiated. The study is based on four translations of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone from English into Russian.

In this article, the hermeneutic-phenomenological aspects of translatological interpretation are examined in the light of the transdisciplinary approach within the framework of the four-step Hermeneutic-translation methodological standard that includes the stages of pre-understanding, understanding, interpretation and translation decision in contrast to the philosophico-hermeneutical practice of interpreting monolingual texts in mutually intersecting and interchangeable types of reflection, namely, understanding and interpretation. It is postulated that a translator is always an interpreter, but interpretation is not yet translation. It is verified as the penultimate stage of the translator’s overcoming of the original cognitive-cultural, ethnopsycholinguistic and system-structural originality of the text and the choice of the strategy of forenization/domestication of the re-expression of the author’s text, search of variants of functionally relevant translation correspondences and ways of overcoming untranslatability. Attention is focused on the postulate of mandatory boundaries and the limits of translation interpretation and the translator’s careful attitude to the source. A translator is not a co-author, but only an interpreter of the author’s work.

Any translation, regardless of its form, the circumstances under which it is carried out or the information contained in original texts, is a cognitive activity of an individual that has relevant competencies. A translator generates information and introduces it into a new communicative space. S/he is a communicative mediator able to settle conflicts of mutual misunderstanding arising in the course of interlingual communication.

Throughout centuries, society has used the results of translators’ work for many various purposes. It evaluates translators’ successes and failures, praises them for what it is inclined to see as fine achievements and executes them for what it finds to be unacceptable.

To what extent does modern science take into account the threefold essence of translation? What models are acceptable in a scientific description of translation activities? How do translatology methods correlate with those of other scientific disciplines in today’s transdisciplinary knowledge about translation?

In the present article, the authors provide answers to these and some other questions posed in modern translatology.

Celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the Journal Congratulatory Messages

The teaching and educating of students are founded on the achievements of pedagogical sciences and new information technologies. The main goal of the educational process is to use the advanced methods of teaching generated by Russian and foreign philological and linguistic schools to provide students with the maximum level of knowledge of various translation theories so that they can develop sustainable abilities and obtain necessary professional skills in the field of translation and interpretation.

The main direction of such education is the use of psycholinguistic abilities of all students who must act in language situations that are close to objective reality; therefore, the latest didactic materials and media training facilities are utilized. Situational classrooms are used as media training facilities in which the equipment makes it possible to create various language situations where the students could use the accumulated knowledge and skills to achieve the goal set by their teacher.

The article focuses on the system-situational teaching with the use of suggestion as one of the methods aimed at increasing teaching efficiency.

In the article, we analyze how particular characteristics of the abstract vocabulary help to reveal distinguishing features of the French and Russian mentalities. It is a matter of weak and strong denotation, the metaphorization of meaning and the material connotation (the term was coined by Vladimir A. Uspensky, a professor of mathematics at Lomonosov Moscow State University), which makes it possible for an abstract noun to make up for the weakness of the denoter. The difference in material connotations in various languages adds a resource for a contrastive analysis. The research allows us to make the following conclusions: a real connotation accompanies an abstract concept, helps to comprehend it better while actualizing it in a specific image. It represents the mythologization of modern consciousness and manifests itself in general linguistic metaphors (in individual metaphors, only the development of the image given by the general linguistic consciousness can occur) and, consequently, has an objective (nonindividual) character. This connotation is objectively motivated and sets imperative laws of associating concepts for every native speaker. It is also important to note that the real connotation is not realized by native speakers, forming a kind of metaphorical concept of a specific idea that can only be revealed through reconstruction and exists not in the individual but in the collective unconsciousness, reflecting the peculiarities of an ethnic group’s mentality.

The article studies the influence of the literary circles phenomena on translation (a case study of Yelizaveta Zhadovskaya’s translation of Paradise Lost by John Milton). The first translation of the poem by Yelizaveta Zhadovskaya was made from Fyodor Zagorsky’s translation in prose which is considered as a great specimen of pragmatic translation: the translator, consciously changing the communicative effect of the original, sacrified the form for the meaning. Yelizaveta Zhadovskaya omitted significant parts of the poem that contained intertextual links, allusions to the works of Antiquity, mythology and sacred texts that formed the literal originality of the poem and added new fragments, thus acting as an author and paving the way for further poetic translations of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

This article is devoted to the semantic comparison of concession expressed in the original version and the translation of the novel Fortress Besieged. As a result, it is confirmed that the vast majority of the translated texts is found equivalent to the original; with the help of aspects of cognitive perception, the reasons for the semantic assimilation are clarified, and the subjectivity of the translator’s personality in translation is emphasized.

The article deals with the Russian nomina, i.e. language identification units, created in the era of the 1917 Revolutions in Russia and ways of their translation into English. The article draws a line between language identification units and linguistic realia, i.e. national-cultural units. Both of them contain information specific to the country in a particular period of its development that causes difficulties in their translation. Special attention is paid to the methods of transferring language identification units from the original language into the language of translation by English writers who tried to create the atmosphere of the revolutionary era associated with numerous changes in the political and cultural fields. Language identification units transfer the changes that occurred in the political life of a particular country. However, precise equivalents are not always possible to find in the target language. Both writers and translators need to use transliteration, transcription, calquing and interpretation to render language identification units into a foreign language.

The article deals with the history of the Russian word “normalny” (normal, regular, sane) and its use in Russian for the last two centuries. The authors draw the attention of translators and foreign students of Russian to the necessity of being very careful when using this lexical unit, which sounds very much like its English analogue. Basing their findings on the National Corps of Russian, the authors trace the historical meaning of the word, periods of its active usage, usage peculiarities and its correlation with the lexical unit “obychny” (usual, normal, ordinary, regular).

The paper is a case study analysis of a translation of the mystery novel Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris into Russian. Due to the unconventional nature of the plot, the translator had to avoid specifying the narrator’s gender, which was a non-trivial job given that the Russian verbs in the past tense obligatorily mark the gender of their subject. To prevent the information disclosure, the translator had to avoid using the past-tense verb forms wherever they combined with the narrator’s first-person pronoun. The paper attempts to reveal and classify the techniques employed to cope with the task. Most cases involve the use of various grammatical and semantic transformations.

The need for interpreters working with the Russian language in China is constantly growing, so more and more universities launch the course “Interpretation” for senior bachelor and master students. However, if the theory of translation in China is developed well enough, the theory of interpretation, and especially interpretation to/from Russian, is almost undeveloped. 

This article describes one of the main issues in the theory of interpretation, namely the using of specific strategies by professional and non-professional interpreters in consecutive interpretation from Chinese into Russian, as well as provides the reader with some methodological recommendations.

In the semiotico-ludical approach, translation of puns can be considered as a hybrid game in which a translator does not only conduct mediation between languages, but also does a linguocreative activity in the target language. The strategies, tactics and transformations, applied to pun translation, are identified here through the use of a translation experiment and a comparative analysis of original puns used in jokes and found in audiovisual products and their translations. The author of the article concludes that quasitranslation becomes the most relevant strategy for translating puns and identifies punning as a specific type of translation deformation which involves such operations as interlingual paronymization, idiomatization and deoccasionalization.

Book review:

Translation and translations: the past and the present (in Russian)