Учебное пособие 1860

Scientific Journal “Modern Linguistic and Methodical-and-Didactic Researches” Issue 1 (20), 2018 ISSN 2587-8093

The image of God appears in a mythical context (Gesang...ist nicht Begehr / Gesang ist Dasein /ein Hauch um nichts /ein Wehn im Gott/ Ein Wind.)

The bond between God and a man is being underlined: a man creates God, God creates a man, at the same time both are trying to understand each other. God is first of all God for a man, without a man God has no sense. (Ein Gott vermags/ Wie aber, sag mir, soll ein Mann ihm Folgen/ Wann aber sind wir? / Und wann wendet er an unser Sein die Erde und die Sterne?).

The musicality of the given sonnet is achieved with the help of an inner rhythm that is in the alliteration of a long vowel “e”, diphthong “ei” and also a combination of consonants s, st, r, hr, tt, nn at the end of stanzas (Leier, zweier, Leichtes, Sterne, lerne, Begehr, er, Erreichtes, Erde, lehrst, aufstȍβt, aufsagst, Gott, Mann, Sinn). The unity of singing and being is proved by sound recording (Gesang ist Dasein). Singing is equal to being, the transition from almightiness of God to a man is shown by the change of the diphthong “ei” to the vowel “i” in combination with “s” (Dasein, sein, dies, ist, nichts).

“Sonnets to Orpheus” is the highest point of Rilke creative work. It’s an autobiographical confession of the poet, his mature work. The sonnet is devoted to deep philosophic problems, questions, over which the poet was meditating his entire life.

The peculiarity of translation of Rilke sonnets is in tone and the accordance between the melody and the content of a verse.

Phonetic musicality of the word in Rilke lyrics is being reflected through numerous examples of alliteration, that means the repetition of the same and similar sounds [13, p. 40].

For example in “Sonnets to Orpheus” Rilke creates special melodiousness and musicality of the coming of spring with the help of repetition of the sound combination “sch’, “h”, “ch”, “st” which personify the sounds of working in a field (onomatopoeia):

Schon, horch, hörst du der ersten Harken / Arbeit; wieder den menschlichen Takt / in der verhaltenen Stille der starken / Vorfrühlingserde (Das XXV. Sonett) [4*, s. 49]. - Already, listen, do you hear the work of raking / again in the human rhythm within the restrained silence of the strong spring earth / (Sonnets to Orpheus part II sonnet XXV) (translation: www.picture-poems.com).

The same sounds in a poem “Der Panther” help the reader to feel the feeling of silent and at the same time stern steps: Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte, / der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht (Der Panther) [5*, s. 15]. - Those supply powerful paddings, / turning there in tiniest of circles (The Panther) (translation: www.picture-poems.com).

2 . L e x i c a l m u s i c a l i t y o f R i l k e l y r i c s .

Lexical musicality is no less important than the phonetic one. Rilke uses in his poems different lexical means to make the poems sound especially melodiously.

The main lexical means is euphony, which means the repeat of one and the same lexeme in one context.

Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit, / als welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten

(Herbst) [8*, s. 9]. - The leaves are falling, falling as if from afar, as if withered in the distant gardens of heaven / (Autumn) (translation: www.picture-poems.com).

The repeat of the verb fallen (to fall) helps the reader to feel the coming of fall — the constant leaf fall on the ground.

Besides the lexical repetition the musicality of a word at the lexical level in Rilke lyrics is also achieved with the help of the correct selection of lexemes. For example, in a verse “Die

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Laute” (The Lute) in order to show the female origin Rilke uses the comparison of the name of the city with the musical instrument that has the form of a female body — the lute:

Ich bin die Laute. Willst du meinen Leib / beschreiben, seine schön gewölbten Streifen: / sprich so, als sprächest du von einer reifen /gewölbten Feige (Die Laute) [1*, s. 25]. - I am the lute / Perhaps you’d like to dress my figure in your words / My curving stripes you may describe as if I were a ripe full-bodied fig / (The Lute) (translation: www.picturepoems.com).

Admiring the work of sculptors, who turn stones into a temple, Rilke creates the occasional word combination “temple-of-hearing” (Tempel im Gehȍr):

Brüllen, Schrei, Gehör / schien klein in ihren Herzen. Und wo eben / kaum eine Hütte war, dies zu empfangen, / ein Unterschlupf aus dunkelstem Verlangen / mit einem Zugang, dessen Pfosten beben, / da schufst du ihnen Tempel im Gehör (Da stieg ein Baum. O reine Übersteigung!) [3*, s 18]. - Shrieks, cries, roars seemed small in their hearts / And where once scarcely a hut stood to receive this, a crude shelter made of the darkest of longings with trembling posts at its entrance way, — there you created a temple in their hearing / (A tree has risen. O pure transcendence!) (translation: www.picturepoems.com).

As Pavlova N.S. notes such sound associations make the sound not only visible, but also create the evidence of architecture, the music of architecture becomes a paradigm of the universe sound [16, p. 139]. Herewith the additional lexical-phonetic means of creating the musicality is the combination of alliteration and onomatopoeia in description of animal sounds.

Special place in Rilke lyrics takes the lexeme “rauschen” (to rustle), which intensifies the melodiousness. Musical peculiarity of this lexeme is being achieved with the help of repetition of the sound [sch], which personifies the noise, the rustle of foliage.

Und manchmal bin ich wie der Baum, / der, reif und rauschend, über einem Grabe / den Traum erfüllt (“ Das Stunden-Buch”, “Ich liebe meines Wesens Dunkelstunden“) [9*, s. 5]. - And sometimes I am like the tree again, that ripe and rustling over a grave / Fulfills the dream / (I love my inmost being’s hours of darkness) (translation: www.picturepoems.com).

3 . S y n t a c t i c m u s i c a l i t y o f R i l k e l y r i c s .

Syntactic musicality of Rilke lyrics has special meaning.

Not only assonance is being paid much attention, but also intonation that carries a certain idea. For a special expressivity the poet often breaks a phrase on an important word in the middle of the line. With this purpose he moves an incomplete sentence to the next line or even stanza.

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme / einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem / stärkeren Dasein. Denn das Schöne ist nichts… (Die erste Duineser Elegie) [6*, s. 3-5]. - Who, if I cried, would hear me, of the angelic orders? / or even supposing that one should suddenly carry me to his heart — I should perish under the pressure of his stronger nature / For beauty is only a step / (The first elegy) (translation: www.picture-poems.com).

At syntactic level special musicality is achieved with the help of frequent use of parallel constructions in structure of Rilke poems.

Parallelism is such a composition in which separate parts are built one-type. In other words,

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the structure of one sentence or its part is being repeated in another sentence throughout the context.

Was wirst du tun, Gott, wenn ich sterbe? / Ich bin dein Krug (wenn ich zerscherbe?) / Ich bin dein Trank (wenn ich verderbe?) (“Das Stundenbuch.” Was wirst du tun, Gott, wenn ich sterbe?) [11*, s. 11-12]. - What will you do, God, when death takes me? / I am your jar (when something breaks me?) / I am your drink (when taste forsakes me?) (What will you do, God, when death takes me?) (translation: www.picture-poems.com).

In the given fragment “Was wirst du tun, Gott, wenn ich sterbe?” (What will you do God, when death takes me?) there are two parallel constructions simultaneously. The second one is put in brackets and thus creates a parallel musical tune.

The musicality of folk character occurs in a ring repeat — proapototic, that means the repeat of elements at the beginning and at the end of a sentence, paragraph or text [2, p. 47] as in a verse “Bangnis” (Anxiousness):

Im welken Walde ist ein Vogelruf, / der sinnlos scheint in diesem welken Walde (Bangnis) [2*, s 7]. - In the faded forest sounds the call of a bird, which seems so meaningless in this faded forest / (Anxiousness) (translation: www.picture-poems.com).

Conclusion.

On basis of the given analysis of Rilke poems among them the poetry collection: “Buch der Bilder”; “Das Stundenbuch”; “Die Neue Gedichte”; “Duineser Elegie”; “Sonette an Orpheus”, the following conclusions are drawn — the word as a unit of a language system plays great role in creating musicality of poems.

Musicality — is the effect of partial similarity of a literary work with music, it occurs as a result of some common for both literature and music techniques.

These techniques are anaphora, refrain, leitmotiv / keynote, parallelism, alliteration. Typical traits of symbolism are peculiar to Rilke lyrics, among them are: 1) the expression

of mysterious with the help of aesthetic means; 2) leaving for a perfect world far from reality;

3) Imagination of the elements of the real world through symbols and images; 4) melodiousness of poetry.

As follows from the given analysis special euphony, harmony and rhythm of Rilke lyrics is achieved with the help of combination of several language techniques at tree levels: 1) phonetic; 2) lexical; 3) grammatical.

At the phonetic level musicality is achieved by special rhythm and rhymed structure of a verse, sound recording, alliteration of words and word combinations, assonans.

Especially evident in Rilke lyrics occurs the combination between sound and meaning and also emotional relation to the sound. At the rhythmic level the main features of musicality are rhythm and line which have such measures as rhyme, metre, syntactic and metrical pauses (end of verse, verse transfer), end of stanza, sound repeat, intonation. Rhythm shows expressivity and emotionality of a verse, metre is means of creating the sense structure that forms the context of a verse. Special rhythm underlines the completeness of each line realizing a semantic rhythmic and euphonic function.

Units of phonetic and lexical levels of the language are harmonizing means in Rilke earlier works, the units of syntactic and lexico-syntactic levels of a language take the first place in late Rilke poems. At the phonetic level Rilke literary works are filled with lots of sound replays. Sound replays of consonant type take the leading place. In Rilke creative work the most important thing is an intentional dissonance between a sound and a sense instead of harmonization of a verse.

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At the lexical level special attention attract lexical repetition, onomatopoeia and also a special choice of lexemes with the music semantics for the purpose of creation an additional melodiousness in a poem. Lexical repetitions are numerous in Rilke literary works. The repeat of official words, such as prepositions, conjunctions, articles, particles is typical for early and late Rilke works.

The ring repeat is the most frequent trick in Rilke lyrics. The repeat at the lexico-syntactic level is compositional, pictorial and expressive, harmonizing means.

At the syntactic level the most peculiar for Rilke lyrics is syntactical parallelism, which means the repeat of two or more sentences, sometimes partial repeat of the coordinative conjunction “und” (and) and the subordinate conjunction “wenn” (when, if), complex sentences.

The above mentioned confirms the fact, that Rilke lyrics has special musicality and melodiousness which is being achieved with the help of Rilke mastery use of a word as a unit of a language that has a special aesthetic potential.

References

[1]Mahov A.E. Musica literaria. Ideja slovesnoj muzyki v evropejskoj pojetike. –M.: Intrada, 2005. –224 s.

[2]Fomina Z.E.,Korobko L.V. Osobennosti verbal'noj reprezentacii fenomena «muzyka»

vhudozhestvennom diskurse L.N. Tolstogo (na materiale proizvedenija «krejce-rova sonata»)/ Z.E. Fomina // Nauchnyj Vestnik. Serija «Sovremennye lingvisticheskie i metodikodidakticheskie issledovanija». – 2015. – vyp. 1 (25). – S. 74-91.

[3]Dörr O. Das Wort und die Musik: zwölf Essays inspiriert durch die Poesie von R.M. Rilke - Kȍnigshausen & Neumann, 2011.—186 S.

[4]Erofeeva L.A Metaforicheskie reprezentacii dominantnyh konceptov v pojeticheskoj kartine mira R.M. Ril'ke. (dissertacija) Saratov 2007.

[5]Freedman R. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. -Northwestern University Press, 1998. – 639 p.

[6]Metzger E.A., Metzger M.M. A Companion to the Works of R. M. Rilke. –Camden House, 2004.-311 p.

[7]Guite C. Das Motiv der Angst in R. M. Rilkes des Malte Laurids Brigge". -Verlag, 2015. –72 S.

[8]Berger K. Rainer Maria Rilkes frühe Lyrik: Entwicklungsgeschichtliche Analyse der dichterischen Form. -Koch, 1931. -148 S.

[9]Bleumer H., Emmelius C. Lyrische Narrationen – narrative Lyrik: Gattungsinterferenzen in der mittelalterlichen Literatur. -Walter de Gruyter, 2011.-413 S.

[10]Brandes M.P. Stilistika teksta. Teoreticheskij kurs. - 3-e izd., pererab. i dop.

- M.: Progress-Tradicija; INFRA-M, 2004. -416 s.

[11]Schneider S. An den Grenzen der Sprache: eine Studie zur "Musikalität" am Beispiel der Lyrik des russischen Dichters Afanasij Fet. –Frank & Timme GmbH., 2009. –695 S.

[12]Moritz J. Die musikalische Dimension der Sprachkunst: Hermann Hesse, neu gelesen. - Kȍnigshausen & Neumann, 2007. -360 S.

[13]Dmitriev A. Istorija nemeckoj literatury. V 3-h t. – T. 3. Per s nem.- M.:

Raduga, 1986. –464 s.

[14]Belova D.N. Russkaja recepcija orficheskogo diskursa R.M. Ril'ke: avtoref. dis. ...

kand. filol. nauk: 10.01.01. - Tomsk, 2009. - 17 s.

[15]Fomina Z.E., Lavrinenko I.Ju. Kognitivnye strategii kak mental'nye deter-minanty pri jazykovoj objektivacii konceptov razuma i chuvstva v filosofskom diskurse F. Bjekona/ Z.E.

Fomina // Nauchnyj Vestnik. Serija «Sovremennye lingvisticheskie i me-todiko-didakticheskie issledovanija». – 2014. – vyp. 1 (21). – S. 23-37.

[16]Pavlova N.S. O Ril'ke. Nauchnoe izdanie. – M.: RGTU, 2012. – 220 s.

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THEORY AND PRACTICE OF TRANSLATION

UDC 81’25

TRANSLATOR’S LEXICAL NEED AS A COGNITION TOOL

E.B. Berg, M. Kit

___________________________________________________________________________

Ural State Law Univerlsity,

Candidate of philological science, associate professor of the Department of Russian, Foreign Languages and Culture of Speech of FGBOU VO USLU

Elena Borisovna Berg, elenabkct@gmail.com

Language Interface, Seattle, USA,

Candidate of technical sciences, CEO of Language Interface, Mark Kit, clodpool@gmail.com

______________________________________________________________________________________

Problem Statement. This paper discusses studies of mechanisms employed to use lexical system of the language and development of translators’ lexical competence. It introduces the concept of lexical need – the necessity to obtain information on lexical units, in particular – in the course of translation. Significance of lexical need studies for cognition is discussed as well.

Results. Authors describe two venues for cognitive action of the lexical need: the first is directed to cognition of the reality through improvement of language competence, the other forms professional space through determination of specifics of each unit of the translator’s lexical need. Studies include specifics of translator’s lexical need in professional communication, including those related to the rank of the lexical unit in the frequency distribution. Authors suggest the concept of meeting the lexical need using dictionaries, taking into account that on top of the information/reference function the dictionary serves as a tool for a language learning and comprehension. In order to study dictionary’s cognitive function, the authors created a dataset consisting of queries sent to the dictionary LexSite (developed by the authors) which works in the English-Russian language pair. The studies demonstrated that the dictionary query analysis can help detect translator’s insufficient knowledge in the areas of vocabulary, grammar and subject matter related to the text under translation. These results help optimize the composition of the team of translators working on a common project. Besides, results of this research can be used to streamline foreign language and translation art tutoring.

Conclusion. Meeting translator’s lexical need through querying dictionaries is a systematic way for the development of lexical competence and enhancement of personal lexical space. Besides, studies of lexical need facilitate shaping translator’s professional space through targeted testing, creation of adaptable programs, optimization of team members workload by scopes and types of assignments and improvement of translation team make-up.

Keywords: lexical need, lexicography, translation dictionary, online dictionary, LexSite dictionary, cognition, translation, cross-language communication, lexical unite.

For citation: Berg E.B., Kit M. Translator’s lexical need as a cognition tool E.B. Berg, M. Kit // Scientific Journal “Modern Linguistic and Methodical-and-didactic Researches”. – 2018. - №1 (20). – P. 138

– 145.

Introduction. The process of globalization, that in the recent decades has been observed in economies, social and cultural life, causes rapid increase in the number of international businesses, programs and project. This causes growth of information flows between speakers of different languages thus resulting in the need for efficient cross-language communications [1, p. 83]. Such communications are arranged through translations, demand for which keeps steadily growing even at times of economic recess [2, p. 20]. In light of these changes, translators

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© Berg E.B., Kit M., 2018

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assume important roles in various facets of modern life. Since bilingual dictionaries are of high importance for translators and high-quality cross-language communication is unimaginable without turning to dictionaries, studies of translator-dictionary interaction seem to be expedient for comprehension of translation process and development of recommendation for optimization of such process.

The act of turning to a bilingual dictionary manifests lexical need experienced by an individual involved in some discourse, i.e. a person participating in a communication action. (This paper does not discuss dictionary queries made for obtaining data on grammar, spelling or pronunciation). Lexical need is understood here as a necessity to obtain information on a lexical unit in order to continue communication activity. This need would not arise should the user possess perfect competence in the discourse languages, however perfect language competence is unachievable even in the person’s first language. In case of cross-language communications, the situation is much more complicated.

Research methodology.

This study used materials obtained from a collection made of user queries sent to the English-Russian/Russian-English online dictionary LexSite developed by the language engineering company Language Interface (USA) [3]. The dataset subjected to the study was composed of 400,000 queries made by 13,133 users in the English-Russian language pair. It also included texts submitted for translation to Language Interface in the period of 1999-2014 along with their translations. Methods employed in the study included observation, statistics, comparative analysis, generalization, classification and math modeling.

Results of the studies.

Depending on whether the text is translated from a foreign language to the native one or the other way around, the lexical need takes different forms: it can be either sense-oriented or form-oriented. Figure 1 shows different classes of lexical need when making dictionary queries.

language

unknown; the need is

to find that meaning

Cross-language

discourse

The meaning of the

Translation

initial lexical unit is

known; the need is to

into a foreign M(x)=>Wf find a form in the

language

foreign language that denotes that meaning

Form-oriented lexical need

Form-oriented lexical need

This diagram shows the lexical needs greatly differ in these communicative situations. Translation into the translator’s native language requires the translator to find the meaning M(x) of an unknown lexical unit x (i.e. meaning-oriented lexical need). In contrast, translation into the native language necessitates search for a foreign lexical unit Wf corresponding to the known meaning М(х) of the lexical unit x encountered in the native language text (i.e. formoriented need). This lexical need will be satisfied through a cognitive action that enhances the translator’s linguistic competence and perception of reality.

Here is a manifestation of the first path for cognitive action of the lexical need – human learns the world: the translator enhances his language competence and perception of the reality.

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Language lexical space Ψ

Personal lexical space ψ2

Personal lexical space ψ1

Everyday communications usually are of this type, using a small vocabulary that covers most communication needs. Beyond the lexical space of daily life, in particular – in professional communications, the frequency of lexical unit occurrences drops steeply with the increase of the rank of that unit in the frequency distribution table. This dependency is described by the Zipf law [4] and can be expressed as f=Ck-B, where B≈1 and C is a constant. G.K Zipf explained this dependency by superposition of opposite actions: speaker’s desire to minimize articulation efforts and listener’s desire to fully understand the speaker. This law was later enhanced by Mandelbrot who suggested another formula that fits the experimental results better,

, where C, V and B are constants [5, p. 503-512]. When V=0 and B≈1, this expression is equals Zipf law.

The exponential reduction of frequency (a Zipfian curve) results in a negligible probability of occurrence of words beyond the first 10,000 – about 1 per 100,000 words [6, p. 575]. It puts constraints on studies of distribution of low-frequency words since the statistics of their occurrences cannot be derived even from large corpora. This problem is mostly irrelevant to regular corpora studies conducted within the range of common vocabulary. An average educated English speaker’s vocabulary includes no more than 20,000 words. Research in a group of university graduates older than 22 demonstrated that their vocabulary scopes are between 13,200 and 20,700 words with the average of 17,200 words [7, p. 356-358].

In contrast, the lexical needs for low-frequency LU that arise in communications involving professional subjects are of scientific and practical interest. For example, professional translators who graduated from foreign languages universities with excellent marks, often fail to translate even relatively simple technical texts.

Studies of this lexical need cannot be use conventional statistical analysis methods, therefore other methods shall be employed. Large corpora obscure low-frequency words and do not reflect their nature and significance. These properties of low-frequency words emerge only in special literature.

The word debridement, for instance, is placed in the end of corpora mainly consisting of commonly used lexical units, such as British National Corpora [8] or Corpus of Contemporary American English [9]. The probability of occurrence of this word is negligible – only 4 occurrences per 100 million in spoken discourse, 1 per 100 million in fiction and 6 per 100 million in periodic literature. However, in scientific literature this word frequency is 154 times greater than in fiction and in special publications on surgery the likelihood if its occurrence can be even of higher.

It is possible to identify the likelihood of some words that seem to be of low frequency. What is missing in a huge corpus can be found in texts related to special fields of knowledge, where the term omitted in most dictionaries is used quite frequently. Lexical units that are unimportant in the general discourses may become of critical importance in certain professional

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areas. This means that making a dictionary with a lexical dataset incudes words beyond the first 10,000 most frequent ones is not advisable since the lexical needs of most users will be met by these most frequent entries. However, this commercial rationale does not match the social needs. Even though it seems that it is not worth the trouble to include these terms in the dictionary for mere 20 people who may need certain terms, those 20 people with the need for rare terms may create conditions for a technological breakthrough that would facilitate the progress of the society. Lexical needs of general public are covered by a large number of dictionaries that can help find, e.g. that English door means дверь in Russian and that Russian театр means theater in English. Besides, lexical need on the everyday life level is not, as a rule, of cognitive character. On the other hand, dictionary queries made by a translator in the course of his professional activity is certainly a cognitive process due to its cognitive effect directed both to the language systems of both source and target languages and to the reality described in the text under translation through symbols used in the language.

Usage of low-frequency lexical units can be studied with the concept of meeting lexical need through dictionaries. With this approach, dictionaries turn from reference materials to a language cognition tool.

There is another path for cognitive action of the lexical need, “the world learns the human”, where professional space is formed through determination of specifics of each particular individual who experiences lexical need through studies and analysis of that need.

Translator can develop his lexical competence in two ways: through contextual analysis or by using dictionaries. In the former case, “guesswork” takes place where the meaning of an unknown word or expression is derived from the context and a lexical unit in the native language is linked to that meaning. For instance, the toponym Vancouver, BC found in the text can be misunderstood because more frequent BC = before Christ is likely to be selected. However, taking into account that the author of the text is a Canadian and having some knowledge on Canadian provinces, the translator understands that in this case BC stands for British Columbia.

Another way to fill out the blanks in the personal lexical space takes place through the use of dictionaries that are a source of responses to the user’s query arising from the lexical need. This turns the dictionary into a translator’s cognition tool. On the other hand, studies of translator’s lexical need help address a variety of organizational and professions challenges. This approach exploits the idea of learning the nature of lexical need phenomena that can, to a large degree, reveal patterns the language usage. This includes determination of the level of user’s language competence and gaps in it, the character of the text being translated, and shortcomings of the dictionary as a user support tool.

To test this concept authors used a collection of queries sent to the aforementioned online dictionary LexSite first published by language engineering company Language Interface (USA) in 2009.

Analysis of dictionary queries can reveal different types of deficiencies in translator’s linguistic competence, including limited vocabulary and knowledge of grammatical or cultural aspects needed for translation. Sometimes user has to search in a dictionary only due to poor knowledge of the foreign language grammar or cultural realities. Queries consisting of more than one word may demonstrate the user’s ability to break the text into semantic units. For example, a query furnace butt-welded pipe manifests that the user failed to separate the semantic unit [butt-welded pipe] from the preceding unit [… furnace].

This analysis can help determine what fields of knowledge the translator feels comfortable with, what grammar and lexical aspects of his language competence should be mastered. This analyses also helps optimize the composition of the translation team working on a common project. Besides, the outcome of such analysis can be used in teaching translation art and foreign language [10] by using adaptive methods where students or examinees are tested against small texts composed based in the results of students’ dictionary queries. The necessity

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for development of personal lexical competence comes out from the existence of nonoverlapping lexical spaces of the text and the translator [11].

Not only meeting lexical needs enables communications in a specific discourse, but also it develops the user’s knowledge system. In cross-language communication, the lexical space (LS) of the translator interacts with the lexical space of the text he works with. Ideally, these two spaces would be equal or the translator’s space includes all elements of the text space; in that case no lexical need would arise. If this is not so, the translator’s LS gradually absorbs the

LS of the text in the course of communication with the text. This process is shown on Figure 4.

In this example translator’s lexical space ϕ consists of 6 elements, two of which also belong to the text’s lexical space λ. When encountering an unknown lexical unit f5, the translator finds its meaning in the dictionary or through contextual analysis and adopts it in his lexical space. If translation is perfect, upon completion of the discourse the translator’s LS has completely absorbed all element of the discourse LS.

Figure 4. E x p a n s i o n o f l e x i c a l s p a c e i n t h e c o u r s e o f t r a n s l a t i o n .

f8

f7

However, translator can misunderstand meanings of lexical units. In this case the translator’s LS does not include all meanings of the text’s LS even though it does include all forms of the text’s LS. For instance, in one occasion, a translator encountered New Orleans, LA in a text and thought that it stands for a list of cities New Orleans, Los Angeles while it actually meant New Orleans, Louisiana. The lexical space of the translator did not acquire the acronym LA (Louisiana) since he used the meaning that had already been available in his lexical space. It is worth noting that he did not experience a lexical need and because of that failed to search in dictionaries.

Comparing translations made by a particular translator with reference translations and analyzing queries sent to the dictionary in the course of the translation one can make inferences regarding the translator’s learning capacity and his analytical capabilities. It is even simpler to evaluate that person’s competence in certain areas of knowledge. Table shows sequences of queries made by a user in a period of about 2 hours. The list of queries makes it clear that the user dealt with a text related to electric power generation. Queries such as “combined cycle power plant” prompt that the user did not know one of the basic concepts of the modern power generation. Poor knowledge of chemical terminology is clearly seen from queries “chloride” and “chloride stress corrosion cracking”. Poor competence in that area manifests itself in such queries as “gas turbine generator” and “steam turbine generator”. Such conclusions are very useful when making selection from a pool of translators for work in certain subject areas and for determination of fields of knowledge where the translator’s competence should be improved.

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