Discursive Personality of the Translator: Translation Competencies and Role Portrait

Abstract

Professional and discursive peculiarities of translation are considered in this article. Nowadays the personality of the translator includes his/her various roles constituting the translator's role portrait and represents an exclusive discursive personality. Translation historically has given translators the opportunity to develop an unprecedented number of competencies and this number keeps getting even bigger at the modern stage of the global social development. The author's attention is focused on various approaches to defining the role status of the translator. The work of a professional translator is multi-faceted as translational action takes place within various discursive practices which variously shape the discursive personality of the translator, his/her professional portrait and communicative behaviour. It is evident that the translator performs communicative action within various discourses, i.e. he/she acquires new discursive features as a result of every single act of communication and thus represents a complicated multi- and interdiscursive phenomenon. A review and analysis of various translational roles are presented in this article. The research has shown that the translator acts as an intercultural communication expert, an intermediary between worlds and cultures, a language consultant, a specialist in the field of another culture, a co-author, an actor, a playwright, a cultural mediator, a designer, a partner, an observer, a nomad, i.e. homo universalis, an exclusive, multifunctional, social and communicative discursive personality.

Keywords

• translator
• discursive personality
• role portrait
• professional competence
• tourism discourse