Russian Linguistic Bulletin (Oct 2022)
TRANSLATION STRATEGIES FOR RENDERING HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTION TERMS FROM ENGLISH INTO RUSSIAN
Abstract
The article is focused on finding the best translation strategy for interpreting higher education institution (HEI) terms in Russia and Asian countries with the help of the forwarded experiment for selecting translation equivalents and comparative English-Russian translation analysis. The research is held on the texts of qualitative scientific and methodological journals “Higher Education in Russia (Vysshee obrasovanie v Rossii)” and Tuning Journal for Higher Education published in Russia and the European Union indexed in SCOPUS and Web of Science; official documents of higher education in Russia and Asian countries posted in the official sites of the educational institutions. 90 terms of education sphere were taken from the texts above and were applied to carry out the following experiment. The study employed various translations of English stimulus language units (metaterms) made by two focus-groups to verify the findings. The first focus-group (G1) comprised 10 Russian-speaking students of Applied linguistics (Russian, English languages) and Practice and Theory of Translation from Bashkir State University, Russia, whereas the second group (G2) included 10 professional translators. The respondents performed the English-Russian translation of 90 metaterms without reference to any manuals or on-line dictionaries. Reference translation units were developed by the authors themselves. The respondents’ results were analyzed for the difficulties and the main translation problems, and then an innovative way to solve the problems described above by developing some appropriate strategies for interpreting the term meanings were proposed. In the article, we single out semanticized, linguistic and cultural and cognitive strategies and come to the conclusion that the integral interaction of all the three translation strategies contributes to the necessary and sufficient information accumulation and leads to comprehending the term meaning at different levels, thereby allowing us to achieve both semantic and formal adequacy of its translation.
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