Articles

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.

The article analyzes translations of Alexander S. Puschkin’s works into the German language made and published in Germany and Austria between 1930 and 19450. The author’s attention is focused on the translator, his motivation, approaches and cultural self-identification. New translations and new discoveries of non-German authors for the recipient are analyzed. In terms of theory, objective and subjective factors that lead to new translations of texts that have already been translated are taken into consideration. The cultural and historical сontext is analyzed along with translators’ personal and virtual motives.

The spread of Western medicine in China occurs in different ways: it is carried out through the setting up of Western hospitals, the creation of Western medical schools and the translation of Western medical literature into Chinese. The spread of Western medicine is inseparable from the medical activities of missionaries in China. As an American missionary doctor, Jia Yuehan worked for 40 years at the Canton Hospital in Guangzhou Province, and spent most of his time working in Western medical education, as well as translating Western medical literature. He played an extremely important role in the spread of Western medicine in China.

The purpose of this article is to examine poetic translation as re-creation. Proceeding from the key tenets of philosophical hermeneutics and the ludenic (from Lat. ludus — game) theory of literary translation the research focuses on the following binary opposition: translator’s game vs. author’s play. The case study provided is an analysis of a poem by Vera Polozkova, a contemporary Russian poet, and its English translation.

This paper expounds the concept of variability in Chinese through discussing the classical translation theories put forward by Yanfu, trans­variation theories introduced by Huangzhonglian and the application of variational translation in literary translation as cross­cultural mediation. It concludes that since variational translation only transmits certain information selected by the translator from the original text for certain purposes, such translation may best satisfy certain readers’ needs.