<p>The article demonstrates the application of the modular competence-based approach for the design of a Master degree programme in translation studies. The case study is based on output materials produced during the lifetime of the Tuning Russia project involving a number of Russian universities, one of which is the Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH). The module in question – the LSP (language for special purposes) translation module – emphasizes interaction between the related disciplines on the basis of the common subject-matter, i.e. the translation of special purpose texts. The modular approach sets out to achieve key competences required for professional qualifications. In addition, the module considers teaching methods, ECTS and assessment tools. Attention is given to the concept of competence-based approach in contemporary education. The authors argue that the competence-based approach introduced in Russia at the national (Ministerial) level in 2016 facilitates Russia’s interactive alignment with the main principles of the Bologna Process adopted by the European Higher Education Area.</p><p><strong>Received</strong>: 01 April 2019<br /><strong>Accepted</strong>: 24 June 2019<br /><strong>Published online</strong>: 29 November 2019</p>

The article presents the model of professional translator competences related to three levels of the ‘second language personality’. The article describes the development of translator competences (communicative, extra-linguistic and specialized ones) on the basis of the well-formed competence in the basic branch of study (the student’s major). Taking stock of the earlier research that has studied the relation between thinking and speech, the authors look into the process of generating the utterance on the basis of a stable mental image that can be interpreted in other language codes. The language interpretation of a conventional familiar mental image requires communicative skills, background knowledge and practical experience. In this case the language interpretation is regarded as an analytical and synthetic process that interpolates similar mental images into the base of stereotyped utterances in a specific subject matter developed through speech experience. Practical translation skills can be built on the basis of well-developed communicative competence and enhanced specialized translator competence.The article highlights the need to introduce integrated programs that include several LSP areas, as they may facilitate the development of the specialized translator competences on the basis of the knowledge in the LSP area of the student’s major in the mother tongue and the communicative competence in the foreign language.

The article illustrates the applied teaching method that helps to eliminate interlingual asymmetries brought about by the differences in the language and conceptional worldviews of the source and target languages (SL, TL). A translation act in a specific communicative situation establishes a contact between SL and TL, which inevitably leads to interference resulting from interlingual contacts and cross-cultural differences. Drawing upon the definition and assessment of interference caused by interlingual asymmetries, the authors offer the ways of eliminating it in translation by making use of interpretive translation transformations. The cases of interlingual asymmetry are illustrated on the examples of translated from English into Russian journalistic texts of political media-discourse, which serve as a teaching material for translators. In rendering denotative and expressive functions – the key functions of the functional style under analysis – the translator resorts to the interpretation of the invariant meaning, which requires moving beyond the structural and semantic parallelism between SL and TL and basing on presupposition knowledge. The comparative analysis carried out by the authors demonstrates that the most common translation techniques are transformations on grammatical and lexical-semantic levels, in addition, explication, or explicitation, and implication of the key features of the described referential situation while switching from SL to TL, the latter presenting the greatest difficulties in translators’ training process.

No abstract

A prompt exchange of information requires a thrift in expressive means and makes relevant the processes of verbalizing and reverbalizing sense in bilingual communication. The analysis of various communicative situations in simultaneous interpreting both from English into Russian and Russian into English show specific parameters of generating a text in the target language, which differ from the traditional author’s text generation. The study’s objective is to introduce the notion of inferencing (in the Russian linguistic studies the term inference is used) as a special linguistic tool of eliciting and interpreting sense in the process of translation/interpreting. General linguistic understanding of inference and implication refers to the direct communication between a sender (speaker) and recipient (listener) that produces interrelated notions via independent inferences. The method of sampling and comparing the inferences accumulated empirically and of simulation modelling of simultaneous interpreting can demonstrate that a distinctive feature of indirect communication via interpreter is multi-component system of additional cognitive procedures at the stage of interpreting. The simultaneous interpreting outcomes as the material of research indicate that conveying the sense in interpreting is based on a dynamic process of inferencing, which is a creative search of implicatures and their reverbalization, with an interpreter resorting to his/ her own thesaurus-based resources (mental lexicon) related to the knowledge of domain, which is a subject of communication. The distinctive parameter of inferencing in interpreting is both the generation of inferences and implicatures and a cognitive analytical process of selecting facts from presuppositional knowledge. The study outcomes show that the cognitive analytical process of inferencing is closely related to probabilistic forecasting, which presupposes an accumulation by an interpreter of a sufficient individual base of verified intuitive solutions and referential languagebased interpretations and presuppositions. The study makes a conclusion that of crucial importance for interpreting is inferencing, rather than inference as such.