Translatological Grounds of Creating Multilingual Internet Resources

Abstract

The article analyses the determined character of forming multilingual Internet space in terms of the status of language in the system of world languages and in the set of languages of website content. Multilingualism is considered as a new stage in the development of web communication, replacing the brief periods of English dominance and the emergence of Internet segments in national languages. The tendency towards representation of content in different languages reflects an attitude towards considering users as participants in institutional discourses. The study uses the examples from material that has undergone a detailed interpretation stage in translation classes and during the preparation of final qualification papers by students in translation. The basis of translatological logistics of a multilingual resource consists in the fact that a site hypertext is objectively conditioned by a set of linguistic characteristics of the original content and the pragmatics of creating translated versions. Therefore, creating a global version in English involves not only changing the site structure, reducing texts and neutralising linguistic and cultural markings, but also ensuring that content is understandable to a wide audience owing to appropriate translation techniques application. Translation into German may be driven by marketing factors, French versions occur in response to high demands of linguistic “purism” in the state and society, while translation into Russian allows expanding the audience of potential users. It is revealed that the use of machine translation in the material reviewed is restricted by the purposes of the discourse and the sociopragmatics of the recipient of the translated version. The refusal to translate using a built-in browser extension reflects the sender’s focus on effective communication and his desire to meet the recipient’s “horizon of expectations”. It is stated that the Internet space development is not determined by regulatory mechanisms, but by the orientation of resources towards the objectives of discourses and the needs and capabilities of their participants.

Keywords

• internet communication
• globalization
• localization
• translation pragmatics
• english
• german
• french
• russian