Current Trends in the Russian Translation Theory: Towards a New Methodological Standard of Translation / Book Review: Mishkurov, E. N. Hermeneutics of Translation (Towards Theoretical and Methodological Standard of Translation): Monograph. Moscow, Military University Press, 2018, 298 p. (in Russ.)

In the second decade of the 21st century Russian translation studies are receiving a fresh impetus. Amid attempts the culture-oriented translatology undertakes to disown principles of the linguistic approach that traces its origin to R. Jakobson’s works, Russian scholars are first and foremost keen on ensuring consistency with methodology of the Soviet and French Canadian school (J.-P. Vinay, J. Darbelnet, G. Mounin, Y. I. Retsker, A. V. Fedorov, E. G. Etkind, etc.) while revisiting existing approaches to translation and recognizing a huge impact the culture has on it. In our opinion, their goal is to develop some universally applicable paradigm, a sort of “framework” theory, that can explain an interaction of all old and new factors in an act of intercultural mediation by means of translation without casting doubt upon translation as such given it has been proving itself as a practice for many centuries. The focus of recent theoretical research is gradually shifted from linguistic reasoning per se towards an in-depth analysis of counterproductive ideas and factors of linguistic and literature studies approaches in the development of the Russian translatology (R. R. Chaykovskiy), discourse aspect of translation within the framework of a communication situation that allows of taking into account all formants of the latter, including the goal and strategy of translation as well as tactics of its implementation (V. V. Sdobnikov), analysis of the transition discourse in a self-organizing translation space forming the translator’s harmonious outlook aimed at harmonizing meanings of interacting languages and cultures (L. V. Kushnina), in-depth analysis of audiovisual translation peculiarities within the process-oriented translation approach that indisputably requires conveying an image-sense of the film dialogue (V. E. Gorshkova), representation of translation as a discourse and communication model facilitating creation of a discourse dossier as a basis for a translation strategy development as exemplified by an institutional discourse (T. A. Volkova), consideration of ways the verbal and cogitative process and translator’s understanding take their course in the mono- and cross-cultural communication (P. P. Dashinimaeva), development of a systemological transdisciplinary model of translation (N. K. Garbovskiy). All these studies implicitly or explicitly touch upon the hermeneutic aspect of translation, a deep philosophical rationale of which has been given in a monograph by E. N. Mishkurov who interprets it as “a hermeneutical turn” and undertakes a critical analysis of fundamental works by F. Schleiermacher, H.-G. Gadamer, W. Benjamin, G. Steiner, P. Ricoeur and other western philosophers as well those by Russian scholars. He postulates that, within a proposed hermeneutic paradigm of translation (HPT), a hermeneutic-translation methodological standard (HTMS) is created as a transdisciplinary interlingual “mental generative” model of translation mediation under the principle of “hermeneutic circle / hermeneutic spiral”. An “algorithm” of the model described as a standard one presupposes that there must be four stages in it: pre-understanding, understanding, interpretation and translator’s decision. The latter is regarded as a stage where phenomenological reduction of interpretation of meanings taking place at the three previous stages is completed. Thus, translations activity is a development and one of the forms of philosophical and hermeneutical treatment of discourse phenomena that considers interpretation as its main tool. E. N. Mishkurov believes that the use of the above mentioned standard allows us to take into account all classic and innovative translation models providing for a “discourse equivalent and pragmatically adequate” version when dealing with different types of texts, their genres, and particularly when translating contexts that cannot be re-expressed by means of regular translation correspondences. The author’s ideas are backed up by examples in Russian, English, French and Arabic.

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