COGNITIVE AND DISCURSIVE FACTORS OF REGULARITIES IN TRANSLATION

Abstract

The article attempts to analyse the cognitive and discursive factors of deforming tendencies interpreted as regularities in translation. This study aims to discover the cognitive factors of the emergence of these translation regularities in the translation of literary texts. Translation regularities should be considered as features present in the target language that are inherent in the translation process and absent in the source language, encoded by linguistic units with procedural meaning. According to Halverson (2010), their nature is related to how the translator processes the linguistic material. These units include conjunctions, prepositions, particles, and interjections, but also products of grammaticalisation – discourse markers (connectives), modal words, and pronouns. These encoders of procedural meaning are the focus of our attention because they are verbal markers of translation regularities that, due to their properties, are not subject to conscious control by the translator during their work. Focusing on the cognitive aspects of the translator's activity seems to be fruitful since finding out the difference in the proportion of functional words, cognitive complexity and shifts in the deictic "axis" in the translated discourse is evidence in favour of the presence of a "third code" (Frawley, 1984) in the translated version, whose language becomes artificial because it has the features of the source language. Experienced translators, who rely mainly on implicit information processing, have integrated coordination of the processes of understanding the source text and producing the target version. They can instantly predict the further course of events in the source text and choose the appropriate processing method based on the statistically more frequent and significant neural connections reflected in their previous experience. Student translators, by contrast, due to their not so rich experience, prefer explicit (controlled), consistent coordination of their cognitive steps in interpreting the source text and generating their target version at the stage of L2 text synthesis. Over time, as translators become more proficient, they gradually shift from using a controlled (arbitrary) horizontal data processing mechanism to an automated (non-arbitrary) one.