Articles

The article considers the emergence and formation of the linguistic and cultural concept “Silk Road,” the most important one in Chinese culture. Based on the analysis of Chinese media texts, four stages of the concept’s development were identified: its emergence in the 1930–40s, its development in the 1950–70s, its symbolic reinterpretation in the era of the “policy of openness,” and its polyphonic sound in the late 20th century. Interestingly enough, this concept penetrated China from the West, but it was deeply rooted in and became a symbol of China, expressing a high appreciation of its civilizational contribution to the Treasury of humanity.

This article is devoted to the study of religious and cult-ritual concepts of the Gothic language. In the course of the research, the processing of historical and linguistic material is carried out, which allows us to analyze the GermanGothic mentality, taking into account, first of all, the specificity of the text of the Gothic Bible. In the study of Germanic and Gothic culture, in particular, a deepening into the lexical and semantic component of the biblical text is carried out. The relationship between the main ethnolinguistic features, the GermanGothic linguistic personality and the linguistic picture of the Gothic vocabulary allows us to look differently at the traditions, life and customs that existed in the Gothic culture. Thus, thanks to the classification and analysis of key religious concepts and value attractors that were part of the hierarchical model of the Gothic tribes’ representation of the essence of the world and the place of man in it, we find a reflection of spiritual and cultural life, recorded by Wulfila in the late 4th — early 5th centuries. In the given concepts, there are accompanying passages from the Holy Scriptures, as well as scenes of everyday life, captured in the form of the author’s comments and in translations of the Gospels of Matthew, John, Luke and Mark. Particular attention is paid to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, since it is in them that most of the author’s “additions” and comments are contained. Translations of the last Epistles of Paul supplement the information received about the life of the Gothic tribes, since they contain direct evidence of a semiotic space in which the cultural and religious concepts of the Germanic and German-Gothic mentality, intersecting in many sociolinguistic aspects, form a single idea of the Gothic linguo-mental complex.

Teaching translation implies taking the context of the original text into account. Only if they understand the deduction mechanism of the linguistic context, the restructuring mechanism of the situational context and the dialogue mechanism of the cultural context, can students develop, step by step, their basic, professional and general translation skills.

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.