Articles

The academic program of the course is based on the author’s many years of experience in theoretical and field research on ethnic cultures of Russia and in teaching the course “Cultures of the peoples of Russia” to students of the Department of Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area Studies of Moscow State University. The interdisciplinary and comparative approaches served as the theoretical foundation of this course. Thematically, the material is grouped according to the types of cultures of the peoples of Russia: semi-nomadic hunters and fishermen of the north; nomads of the steppes and mountains; settled mountaineers of the Caucasus; settled inhabitants of the plains; diasporas of the peoples of the near abroad, far from their ancestral homelands. To create a comprehensive picture of the studied peoples, the main attention is focused on the continuity of culture in the following way: from autochthonous traditions to modern professional art (ethnic literature, music, painting, and cinema). Different types of ethnic art and literature are regarded in the context of the processes of cultural identification of peoples in the context of globalization.

This article presents a comparative analysis of criticism of conventional academic history, formulated in E. Wolfe’s book “Europe and the People Without History” and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference”. Critics address positivism, eurocentrism, progressivism, and stadial history, which Chakrabarty refers to as “historicism”. In the first part, the author explains the meaning of Chakrabarty’s concept of “historicism” and summarizes Wolfe’s description of conventional history, which fits in this concept. The second part focuses on the various elements of their criticism. In the third part we present quotes that showcase how both scholars strive to write history outside of the confines of the historicist paradigm.

Foreign languages have always occupied a prominent place in Russia and Russian culture. Despite the apparent isolation from the outside world, Russia has always been closely connected with this world. And not only through obvious trade and political relations, but also by spiritual and cultural ties. The first significant reason for the spread of foreign languages in society was the adoption of Christianity, which brought not only a new faith, but the Greek language along with theological books. The entire subsequent history of the formation and development of the country, all the key historical epochs and events in Russia are in one way or another connected with the problem of the outside world, primarily with the European one — even in those cases, quite frequent in Russian history, when this world was rejected, criticized and was considered a necessary evil, from which it was preferable to fence off with some kind of curtain. Over time, all new foreign languages spread in society, sometimes even entering into conflict: Latin with Greek in the theological field, German with French in the political field, French with English in the literary field. In certain historical periods, for example, in the first half of the 19th century, foreign languages even supplanted the native in a certain social environment and became a reason for unrest regarding the loss of national identity. And sometimes, such as during the Soviet era, these languages were deemed “dead languages”, serving solely as a tribute to tradition and a tool for reading. However, they always retained their important role, opening up new horizons for the Russian people and connecting them with the outside world.

The article explores adaptation as a means of rendering fictional realia. Fictional realia (also known as quasi-realia and irrealia) are understood as a special kind of linguistic realia (culture-specific items) that exist within the genre of speculative fiction. These lexical units describe various aspects of fictional worlds: flora, fauna, everyday life, social and political structure, etc. Adaptation in general is defined as a specific form of intercultural and interlingual mediation that relies heavily on capabilities and necessities of a target audience. Unlike regular translation, adaptation does not necessarily strive to preserve formal and, in some cases, semantic features of the original text. Adaption can be used for different purposes: to make a text more comprehensible to a target audience, to influence a reader in a specific way, etc. When it comes to rendering fictional realia, adaptation can be interpreted in two ways. Firstly, it can be defined as adaptation of fictional objects, concepts, and phenomena to reality (when fictional realia are replaced by their real counterparts). And secondly, it can be understood as linguacultural adaptation that is conditioned by cultural and linguistic differences between an original and a target audience. The article primarily focuses on the second type of fictional realia adaptation. The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments by Margaret Atwood are used as source material for the study. The article draws connections between fictional realia adaptation and creation of new fictional realia (a means of rendering fictional realia that can be defined as either giving a new name to an existing fictional realia or introduction of a completely new fictional realia).

Under the explanatory indicators of the meanings of unknown words, we mean such a way of revealing the meanings of words that are incomprehensible or obscure to readers, when the author accompanies these words with an explanatory comment. The purpose of this work is to analyze various ways of using explanatory indicators in the translation of F. Abramov’s novel “Two Winters and Three Summers” into English. In the course of the work, the following was established. Firstly, explanatory indicators are the most effective indicators of the meanings of unknown words, however, as a rule, they are used only in such literary texts that do not create the illusion of reflecting the events described by any of the characters and are clearly addressed to uninformed readers. Secondly, an effective way to translate Russian unknown words into English is practical transcription, it can preserve the phonetic features of the Russian language. Practical transcription is not used independently; explanatory indicators of meanings are often accompanied in translations by practical transcription. Thirdly, explanatory indicators can be used in the translated text in one of three ways: (1) replacing the Russian unknown words with a description of the meaning of the word in the translation (i.e., semantic translation); (2) replacement of the Russian unknown words in the translation with an approximate English equivalent, after which the meaning of the word is specified by means of a semantic translation; (3) replacement of the Russian unknown words with a practical transcription in the translation, followed by an explanatory commentary on the word.

The article determines the new term intervarietal, or intermediary translation and explains why the need for integrating this type of translation into curricula has been enhanced today. The challenges of intervarietal translation are viewed in the framework of L. Smith’s theory of intelligibility in intercultural communication — in the aspect of form, semantics, and pragmatics. These problems are directly related to studying varieties of the pluricentric English language, though they are also significant for studying other pluricentric European languages. The most urgent need for today’s translation practice is in study East Asian Englishes, translation of which results in a number of mistakes, since translators from European languages do not know the specifics of Asian Romanizations, transfer features typical of Asian English users, or Asian cultures. Based on syllabi of the LMSU Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area Studies, we have shown the possibility of integrating studying these problems in translation curricula.

Eponymous terminology plays an important role in medicine: it is impossible to imagine an area of study in which there would not be used compound terms with an onomastic component or common nouns derived from onyms. Nevertheless, there is an ambiguous attitude towards eponymous terms in the scientific community. From the point of view of displaying linguistic and cultural-historical information, the most important function which is realized in the eponymous terms with an anthroponomic core is the commemorative function. The aim of this study is to analyze the commemorative function of the eponymous terms of clinical neurosciences (neurology and psychiatry). Practical material is taken from MedicineNet.com. During the study, using the method of continuous sampling, 155 eponymous terms were selected. The study made it possible to identify the following problems of the current state of the terminological system of neurology and psychiatry: the use of patients’ surnames as an eponymous component of the term along with the surnames of doctors; inaccuracy of information about the history of the study of diseases associated with the perpetuation in terms of the names of doctors who are not pioneers; the presence in the terminology of negatively colored onyms associated with the ideologists and accomplices of Nazism.

The article is devoted to the description of peculiarities of the structure of news text (media-text) in Internet discourse, which from the structural point of view is a complex communicative unity of text, hypertext, dynamic (static) image and sound, providing non-linear, multi-channel, multi-layered and multi-dimensional perception of the conceptual meaning of the text. A distinctive structural feature of a media text, the main function of which in today’s media space is to manipulate and shape the recipient’s opinion, is its shaping in accordance with the model of an advertising text, based on the key strategies of an advertising message construction. The purpose of this article is to analyze the structural characteristics of news text (media-text) as the main form of information and psychological impact realization. The authors conclude that a modern news text resorts to the use of rhetorical and organizational techniques to influence the target audience, using appropriate advertising techniques. Creating it, the addresser is guided by different linguopragmatic principles. A model of a media-text similar to an advertising text seems to be justified as it is a part of a unified consumer society, where advertising and online discourse have defined the main patterns of interaction between the addresser and the addressee.

The article deals with the problem of semantic perception of a poetic text, in which the reader’s attention is de-automized by such foregrounding technique as the defamiliarization of the inner form of the word. Relying on the methodological frameworks of creative linguistics and cognitive linguistics, the author of the article aims at describing the inner-form-defamiliarization technique in terms of its functioning in poetic speech. Particular attention is devoted to identifying the factors of verbal and conceptual creativity, which determine the possibility of speech conventions transformations in poetry. The article provides a terminological clarification of the notions of “the inner form of the language” and “the inner form of the word”; emphasis is placed on the importance of studying these phenomena from the non-conventional meaning construction perspective. It is shown that the technique of the inner form defamiliarization has a complex implementation in poetry and contributes to performing a number of interrelated functions of the poetic language — cognitive, expressive, poetic and metalinguistic. Based on the examples of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s essays from the book “Phosphorus” and Charles Bernstein’s essay-poem “Artifice of Absorption”, the linguo-creative intentions of the poets are reconstructed. The techniques of the inner form defamiliarization, typical of these poets, are described, including poetic etymologization of the word through its occasional definition; paronomasia; renomination and attribution of occasional formmeaning motivation to the word. The cognitive universality of linguo-creative techniques of the inner form defamiliarization is described in relation to general functional mechanisms for switching and developing verbal associations, which provide for the non-conventional meaning construction.

This article presents the results of an empirical study of learners’ needs analysis to design a potential training course to adapt teachers to work in a middle school with International Baccalaureate (IB MYP) programs. The purpose of the study was to identify learning needs as well as gaps and expectations, preferred formats, amount of time that teachers in Russian schools have available for professional development courses in IB MYP programs. Using a survey method, the study identifies learning preferences of teachers as participants in a potential course: practice orientation, attention to documentation, preferred topics and formats of work. The learning needs analysis also revealed barriers that may prevent teachers from effectively engaging in professional development, including lack of time, conceptual complexity of the material, lack of institutional support and lack of professional guidance. The Learning Needs Analysis has proven to be a convenient, relatively simple, flexible, and effective tool for subsequent course design. The authors conclude that it is versatile for courses of varying focus and duration and suggest a number of ways to make the method more useful for understanding the learning context of specific groups by adding sociometric questions.

The current stage is characterized by the dynamic development of artificial intelligence technologies and their introduction into foreign language teaching. Chatbots are one of such dialogical interactive teaching programs capable of developing foreign-language oral and written speech skills of a learner by maintaining a dialogue with them and imitating human speech on the basis of natural language and machine learning technologies and the algorithms of human speech embedded in the programme. The present paper is based on the analysis and synthesis of methodological studies devoted to the development of methods of teaching pupils and students foreign-language oral and written speech interaction based on chatbots. The most frequently discussed aspects in the problems of modern research are identified, and the prospects for further research related to the use of chatbots in teaching a foreign language are defined. The most commonly discussed aspects in methodological papers include: a) identifying learners’ attitudes towards the use of chatbots; b) identifying the possibility of developing learners’ written and oral speech skills based on chatbots; c) determining the level of learners’ proficiency in a foreign language for educational interaction with a chatbot. As prospective research, we identify studies aimed at a) developing step-by-step methods of teaching foreign language speech interaction based on chatbots; d) defining the nomenclature of foreign language speech interaction skills with a chatbot.

The article is aimed at the analysis and classification of the main stages of digitalization of language education in the world. The use of computer technology in teaching foreign languages began more than 80 years ago. Until recently, this topic was the subject of discussion of a rather narrow circle of specialists, but with the onset of the digital era and the rapid development of mobile and cloud technologies, artificial intelligence, more and more foreign language teachers in our country and abroad are introducing open educational resources into the educational process and applications, design distance courses and massive open online courses for teaching foreign languages. At the moment, there is an urgent need to analyze the stages of implementing computer technologies in teaching foreign languages and to identify some methodological features of the organization of the educational process supported by ICT, namely: the dominant method of learning, some didactic potential of the latest technologies, the role of the student and teacher, etc. Five main stages of the digitalization of language education were identified, which were named in accordance with the dominant teaching method: behavioral, audial, integrative, social-communicative, task-based communicative. The article also discusses the types of learning that have appeared due to digital technologies, such as mobile, social learning, learning based on augmented and virtual reality technologies — immersive learning. Particular attention is paid to the opportunities provided by artificial intelligence — deep learning, chat-bot learning, robotic learning of foreign languages.

Although J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” has been rendered into Russian multiple times, in each new version its protagonist, Holden Caulfield, sounds surprisingly different. In this paper we seek to elaborate on some issues concerning the translation of the novel. We contend that it is vital to check translation against the reaction of the original recipient (the American reader) to the original text, on the one hand, and the effect the existing translations produce or produced on the new recipient (which is the Russian reader in our case), on the other. An examination of the difference between the former and the latter will create the necessary touchstone against which it will be possible to critically evaluate the existing renditions and offer guidelines for every new translator to follow. It is shown that data obtained through such analysis might provide more valid criteria for the criticism of existing translations and, appropriately enough, contribute to the quality of those yet to come. We also challenge the commonly accepted opinion that translation of slang expressions in the novel plays a dominant role in achieving the necessary level of equivalence. Against this backdrop, we make a few points about the narrator’s voice as something instrumental in character development. To this end, we shall focus on the more well-known Russian versions of Rait-Kovaleva (1960) and Maxim Nemtsov (2008), of which there can be found documented reader feedback, both professional and amateur. We do so with special regard to the author’s intentionality and sociolinguistic factors.

The article is devoted to the issue of preparing science students for an oral exam in English. The author analyzed the data of research considering the relationship between Teacher Talking Time and Student Talking Time in a foreign language classroom, conducted by C. Chaudron, V. Cook, D. Nunan, R. Ellis, C. Pesce, A. Korenev and D. Babaeva. The ratio of 30% to 70% was determined as optimal for oral speech practice and the conclusion is made that it is possible to increase Student Talking Time with the help of pair and group work.

The methods of preparing students for an oral foreign language examination are analyzed on the basis of teaching strategies at the biological faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University. The English language oral exam for undergraduate students consists of the following three tasks: a prepared monologue on the subject of personal and scientific interests of the examinee; an impromptu monologue-description based on visual materials on biological topics, and a dialogue with the teacher to continue the discussion of the topic presented in the visual materials. The possible difficulties that students face doing each task during an oral foreign language exam are listed. The author has proposed some solutions to overcome the difficulties associated with the insufficient practice of oral speech.