Main points

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 617.

LEXICAL ASPECTS OF INTERPRETATION

UNIT 6

6.1 The notion of the “focus of meaning”

6.2 Subject field words (terms): ways of interpreting them

6.3 Set phrases (clichés) and phraseological units (idioms): ways of interpreting them

6.4 Other “troublemaking” lexical units: numerals, proper names, specificitems of the

nationallexicon,nationally coloured idioms, culture-bound termsabbreviations,

acronyms, “misleading words”: ways of interpreting them

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6.1 The notion of the “focus of meaning”

There exist many approaches to identifying “translation units”, i.e. “chunks of speech” subject to interpreting/translating [Миньяр-Белоручев 1996: 76-78, Рецкер 2004: 27-32], however most authors (L. Barkhudarov, R. Jones, Ya. Retsker, Yu. Stepanov, J.P. Viney, J. Darbelnet) believe that any unit of speech (i.e. phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs and texts) may be subject to interpretation and translation. V. Koptilov even suggests a special term for the translation unit – the so-called “translateme”, which is defined “as an “atom of sense” that cannot be split up without ruining the sense” [Коптілов 2003: 13]. Selection of translation units is determined by the conditions in which interpretation/translation is performed, by the subject field of the SL text and by the level of professional skills of the interpreter/translator. However, whatever units of translation are chosen, it is obvious that interpreters, while interpreting, memorise the SL text by the so-called “focuses of meaning”[1]. A system of interpreter's note-taking, which is described in Unit 5, is also based on recording “focuses of meaning” by using special symbols and abbreviations. Experiments show that human brain is capable of keeping in memory 7 +/- 2 focuses of meaning [Миньяр-Белоручев 1969: 66], therefore, interpreter's note-taking is a useful tool which enables interpreters to “reconstruct” oral messages for their subsequent interpreting.

As a rule focuses of meaning are formed around the “keywords” of oral discourse, which include, first of all, specific subject field words, i.e. terms belonging to the subject field of interpreting. Among other focus-forming elements of oral discourse are set phrases (clichés) and idioms; numerals, proper names, abbreviations, acronyms (the so-called “precision lexicon”) [Чужакин 1998: 7]; non-equivalent lexical items and “misleading words”.