Translation Strategies for Phonographic Deviations: A Psycholinguistic Approach
Abstract
The article proposes a psycholinguistic approach to investigating translation strategies on the basis of information obtained in the course of the retrospective experiment designed by the authors and defined as ‘Partial Delayed Report of Problems and their Solution’. The aim of the research is to expose and describe translation strategies for resolving such a variety of translation difficulties as phonographic deviations. The object of the research is translation strategies as a mental by nature and complex by structure plan for the translator’s actions. The subject of the research is specifics of the above strategies’ formation and implementation in literary translation.
The main method of the research is retrospective experimental technique ‘Partial Delayed Report of Problems and their Solution’; other methods employed include algorithmic modeling (for prospected translation strategies and substrategies) and comparative analysis (for control units in the source and target texts).
The material of the research was twofold: (1) the fragment of Charles Dickens’s novel “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club” and its translations carried out by 21 semi-professional subjects of the experiment; (2) the subjects’ reports in the form of the answers to the questionnaire completed and submitted after the translation. Since strategies in translation studies are mostly dealt with within cultural approach, the authors turned to the concept of communication strategies as a foundation of their own psycholinguistic model of translation strategies for phonographic deviations.
The analysis of the experimental data supports the conclusion that the translator initially forms a strategy (conscious mental plan) of overcoming a certain variety of translation difficulties (such as phonographic deviations) and then implements it as a sequence of moves (substrategies) aimed at providing for the most natural for the target reader translation variant.
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Sources
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