General problems and methodology of translation and linguistics

 

The provisions of the various linguistic disciplines shed light on many important aspects of translation.

First of all, the universal, universal human character of language and thinking, identified by linguistics, is the basis for the translation process, testifying in favor of the possibility of translation.

All languages consist of two-sided units with sound and meaning.

All of them have a vocabulary and grammatical structure, serve as a means of forming thoughts and transmitting them in the process of communicating with other people.

All languages are used to construct messages about extralinguistic reality. All of them are capable of expressing, in various ways, the conceptual categories of time, places, numbers, modalities and many others, denoting classes of objects and individual objects and their signs, processes and states.

This universality reflects the unity of human thought and the world around it. And it determines, ultimately, the possibility of translation.

At the same time, the main difficulties that a translator faces are associated with the peculiarities of languages and the ways in which they are used to name objects and describe situations. Here we can distinguish three types of difficulties: the specificity of the semantics of linguistic units, the discrepancy between the “pictures of the world” created by languages to reflect non-linguistic reality, and the differences in reality itself, described in translated texts.

Each language unit has a stable, intrinsic value only. These values are formed in languages under the influence of different conditions and factors, and, as a rule, do not coincide. Therefore, the translator has to constantly decide which values of the language units most closely match the content of the original. Compare: the words "table" and the English "table", used in the literal sense - a piece of furniture, represent a couple of equivalents, but the correspondence is broken with the complication of the meaning: "desk" - "bureau", "buffet" - "smorgasbord", and vice versa, multiplication table” corresponds to the Russian“ multiplication table ”.

Translation difficulties may arise due to the fact that in the original are called some phenomena that are absent in the host culture and unknown to the receptors of translation. Such phenomena include, for example, the Russian steppe and taiga, the English double-decker - a double-decker bus, etc.

Modern translation also makes extensive use of linguistic research methods that provide objective data on the complex phenomenon of the translation process: comparative analysis, component analysis, methods of transformational analysis and statistical calculations, linguistic modeling method, and psycholinguistic experiments.

The translation process is a process of correlation between the texts of the original and the translation, in which certain relations between the two texts are established in different languages. Naturally, the main method of research in translation studies is the method of comparative analysis. Depending on the specifics of the material being compared, this method can serve the researcher as a tool for various applications.

An interesting research technique of translation studies borrowed from modern linguistics and psychology is a psycholinguistic experiment and a procedure for interviewing informants. At the same time, participants in the translation process act as informants: translators trying to answer questions, how they act and how they are guided in the translation process, as well as translation receptors who can make judgments about the language of translation, distinguish translated texts from non-translated ones, formulate their requirements to translations, etc.

 

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