Reliance on the Situation of Reality as a Factor of Translation Transformation

The article focuses on the translation of military and journalistic texts from German into Russian based on materials taken from the channels ZDF, Österreichisches Bundesheer, and WELT and analyzed within the framework of the denotative model. The author attempts to transpose the principles of this approach to the sphere of military publicistic discourse. The current international situation draws the author’s attention to the necessity of revisiting the issues of modelling the translation process that were formulated in the works of V.N. Komissarov, and applying them specifically to military journalistic texts. The article also makes use of studies by prominent Russian and foreign scholars such as N.S. Avtonomova, M.Ya. Tsvilling, G.M. Strelkovsky, A.D. Schweitzer, S.D. Shelov, J.C. Catford, J. Albrecht, G. Bayer-Hohenwarter, and W. Koller. For a long time, translation studies have adhered to two stereotypical assumptions: (a) that the translator’s creativity is more characteristic of literary translation, and (b) that the translation of specialized texts is reduced exclusively to the problem of rendering terms. In this article, the author attempts to demonstrate the opposite, since units of general vocabulary can acquire terminological load as a result of transformations in their semasiological properties, which compels the translator to refer back to the real-world situation. The study also touches upon the influence of regional variants of the national standard language as a factor that determines the choice of an adequate translation equivalent. The aim of the research is to identify the factors affecting the translator’s decision-making when working with military and publicistic texts. To achieve this goal, the author employs such methods as analysis and synthesis of scholarly literature on translation theory, the denotative approach, componential analysis, and distributional analysis. The research establishes that the optimal translation strategies for such texts include functionally equivalent substitutions, generalization and/or specification, as well as inter-hyponymic translation. The article may be of interest to philologists, linguists, translators, students and postgraduates, as well as teachers of German and translation.

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