Moscow University Translation Studies Bulletin. 2018. 1.

Celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the Journal Congratulatory Messages

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.

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.

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.

The paper deals with the problem of the so-called undefined realia in ancient texts, i.e. cultural words, the precise meaning of which cannot be exactly established today. The monetary unit kesita mentioned in the Old Testament is chosen as an example, and its representations in different Bible translations are analyzed. Although the raised question may seem too narrow an issue, it may, nevertheless, relate to important historic and cultural features of the world described in the original text.

The abstracts of the all papers published in Vestnik of Moscow State University. Series 22. Translation Theory in 2013–2017 are presented.