TRANSLATION FORMAT AS CROSS-CULTURAL CODE

Abstract

The literary text modeling is the way to interpret the literary format of knowledge as the unit of some thematical subformats which are translated in different ways. This study aims to identify the tendency of translation format as cross-cultural code. The translation format is the unity of both cognitive-hermeneutic analysis of the original context and cognitive-comparative analysis of the both original and translated contexts. So, cognitive-hermeneutic analysis of original text discovers the specific feature of text structure and the cognitive-comparative analysis of literary discourse dynamics in both original and translated text structures identifies the whole adaptation of original literary discourse dynamics under the influence of cognitive base of translator to the perception of foreign readers. The original text model consists of different thematical types of literary knowledge, such as literary space, literary time, cultural text space, plot knowledge. It was found that markers of literary space occur with high frequency among other textual markers in the novel “L’île mystériouse” by the French writer Jules Verne. Literary space is represented by proxemes, which are classified into four types: nouns with spatial semantics, verbs of motion, landscape units, and place names.

The analysis shows that landscape units are the most frequent in the novel, followed by other types of proxemes. It was also established that, in the process of intercultural recoding of the novel from French into English, landscape units are rendered using various strategies, including symmetric translation, asymmetric translation, and combinations of both approaches. In symmetric translation, the structures of the source text correspond directly to those of the target text. Conversely, in asymmetric translation, the structures of the source text do not correspond directly to those of the target text. It has been demonstrated that a high-frequency correlation between symmetric and asymmetric translation strategies is observed in the rendering of landscape-related units in the novel “L’île mystériouse”. The results obtained contribute to the further development of contemporary translation theory.