Articles

When we use bilingual dictionaries, what makes us believe that the translations they offer are valid? Comparing the English nouns smile, grin, smirk, sneer with their translations in bilingual English-Russian and English-French dictionaries, I consider as criteria of translational adequacy the following: ostensive (referential) equivalence, etymology, morphology, phonology, (monolingual) definitional equivalence, (bilingual) reversion (reversibility). The special characteristics of reversion suggest that It might be worth distinguishing translation equivalents (=reversible items typically heteroglossal synonyms) as a hyponymic subset of translations (=heteroglossal definitions). Not considered here (for lack of immediately accessible evidence) is contextual or cotextual equivalence, though it would be significant if items in different languages had similar collocations and colligations.

The paper highlights (from a position of conceptual integration techniques) the ways the verbal anti/memes function in the modern political communication. Special attention is paid to the role and ways in which the definite memplex is used in the special politically controversial situation of Brexit, particularly for persuasive purposes.

This article is dedicated to the jubilee of the outstanding scientist, talented person and experienced leader, Professor Galina Georgievna Molchanova. Scientific interests of G.G. Molchanova cover a wide range of areas and topics in the field of cognitive linguistics, polycodal models of intercultural communication, clustering approach in verbal and non-verbal communication studies, memetics and other breakthrough interdisciplinary areas. The focus of special attention is on the issues of the cognitive and polycodal aspects of communication a) in speech; b) in text/discourse, mythology as a means of mind transformation in political discourse, cognitive memology, intertextuality as a semiotic code, semiotic approaches to the study of text and discourse. Author’s courses “Semiotics in intercultural communication”, “Modern techniques and approaches to the study of text/discourse”, “Cognitive studies in language and intercultural communication, intercultural adaptation of text and translation” are a platform for the development of students and the formation of young researchers. Achievements in pedagogical, scientific and administrative work spheres of G.G. Molchanova present a portrait of a brilliant scientist and an outstanding personality, her energy and inexhaustible scientific potential give prompt development and support to all those who work day after day with Galina Georgievna.

The article deals with one of the most important issues of current methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language, and, on a larger scale, of teaching foreign languages, which is the problem of adapting a literary text. The study is relevant today because there is a need to introduce a scientific and theoretical approach to this problem, since the underdeveloped theoretical and practical system of tools complicate the adaptation of the original text, and, consequently, the reading and understanding of the adapted version of the text. The article describes the author’s long-standing experience and presents the results of the comparative analysis of authentic literary texts and their adapted versions taken from Russian textbooks for foreigners. The question is raised concerning the correlation between the concepts of a secondary text and an adapted text. The academic novelty of the research con- sists in formulating the concepts of linguistic and non-linguistic principles of adaptation. The non-linguistic principles (citation, deletion, reordering) relate to the structural changes in the work of fiction, while linguistic principles (replacement, reduction, addition, inversion) belong to the sphere of language. A definition is given to the concept of an adapted literary text. A classification is proposed for the types of adapted literary texts (fragment text, editing text, variation text).

Content and language integrated learning of a foreign language for professional communication is a new approach for Russian higher education. Its distinctive feature lies in the dual purpose of teaching non-language-majoring students: a) a foreign language for professional communication and b) a basic specialty. Achieving the goal of the simultaneous formation of professional foreign-language communicative competence and a number of general professional and professional competencies will be largely determined by the subject-specific content of the integrated course and educational materials developed on the basis of this particular approach. In this paper, the authors points out the relevance of developing educational materials based on content and language integrated learning and contucts six stages of developing teaching materials on subject-specific modules of an integrated course: 1) determination of the content of subject-specific modules of the advanced course; 2) determination of subtopics of each subject-thematic module for study during the integrated course; 3) selection of professionally oriented texts for training; 4) highlighting active vocabulary in selected texts of professional orientation; 5) development of tasks for the development of types of speech activity; 6) development of tasks of professional orientation. The article details the content of each of the stages.

This article addresses the issue of the Event, which is of great importance for XX century’s philosophical thought (A. Badiou, V. Bibihin, M. Heidegger), but has its roots in Ancient “Poetics”, where Aristotle sees it as the basis of ancient Greek art and ancient Greek drama in particular. We examine the Sophocles’s tragedy “Oedipus Rex” to illustrate the duality of the Event as it unveils itself during the performance, combining theatricality, introspection and observation with action and pathos. The Event in full measure reveals itself through the main character, Oedipus, creating the tragic universe of the apollonian harmony and dionysian knowledge. It should be noted that previously mentioned characteristics of the phenomenon do not only reveal themselves on the stage, but have their roots in a real life experience, so we can refer to them as to the very beginning of the theatre. The Event has the ability to organize and emphasize special moments of the awareness and consciousness in the world of chaos and instability, and so becomes an “impulse”, the beginning of the theatricality itself. Thus, this peculiarities of the concept let us compare and analyze two distant epochs such as Ancient Greece and Modernism: find more similarities than differences in the operas of Sophocles, Artaud and Beckett despite the gulf of time which separates them, which is also a significant contribution of the Event.

The article analyzes the influence of mass culture on theatre experiments of Italian futurists. Mass culture is considered to be an opposition of elite or high culture because its production has a standard character, it is aimed at entertainment and it is commercial, while high culture is aimed at creating new esthetical experience and serves as a source for mass culture where it is reproduced in a reduced way. However, the study of Italian Futurist theatre of 1910–1920s reveals that it was mass culture that served as a source for the transformation of high culture and the creation of new language of theatre. In particular, Italian futurists turn to such forms of shows as variety theatre and music hall and borrow a number of their practices. In their theatre experiments they aim at changing the idea of theatre and separate it from literature as a different art genre. In order to do so they deny the dominating character of text in favour of other means of expression. Although Futurism as one of avant-garde movements, without doubt, belongs to high culture, it redefines the notion of public and turns to mass audiences trying to get them out of the state of passive perception by attacking their senses instead of their intellect. The avant-garde aims at transforming the world by means of art, and to solve this task it sometimes adopts the formal elements belonging to mass culture.

The article describes Japanese nourishment system as a subject of culturology. It investigates processes that are taking place in Japanese cultural tradition connected with innovation in Japanese food, penetration into the Japanese system of traditional nutrition of Western dishes and their impact on the food culture. Foreign words that are part of the Japanese language are recorded in a special alphabet called katakana. The same rule applies to the names of dishes. At the same time, there is an evident paradox: the dish can be very popular, becoming an integral part of the national cultural tradition, but at the same time its name will be written in the alphabet for foreign words, to emphasize its foreign origin. However, another process can be observed. Sometimes Japanese dishes themselves and their names combine both Japanese and Western traditions. However, many of the dishes that are served today in Japanese restaurants and in Japanese families have been borrowed from different cultures at different times. And the names of these dishes and the methods of their preparation underwent a certain adaptation, and today it is really difficult to imagine that until recently these seemingly truly Japanese dishes were not in the culinary culture of Japan. Yet the Japanese very carefully introduced changes to the methods of their preparation, and therefore, in many cases, the recipes remained close to the original. What was the only requirement for a recipe change? Seasonings, which are a kind of hallmark of Japanese cooking. What are the most important seasoning ingredients in the Japanese food system? Miso paste production and its role in nutrition and on the Japanese table.

The program of the lecture course is based on the interdisciplinary approach to research of traditional music that is regarded in connection with mythology, folklore, axiology and world view, ethnic historical memory, rituals, transformation practices, ethnic pedagogy, processes of ethnic-cultural identification of peoples through music in the modern world. This approach is based on years of experience reading a course of lectures on traditional music of the peoples of the world at the Department of Cultural Studies of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area Studies, Moscow State University. Thematically the course is divided into three units. The first unit covers the theoretical foundations of the course and methodology of comparative music culture study. The set of lectures of the second unit is dedicated to traditional music of peoples of Russia, India, China, Iran, Turkey, Greece, Scotland, Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, USA, Canada, American and African indigenous musical cultures and others. In lectures of the third unit the role of ethnic music in the modern world and the developing potential of musical ethnic instruments in actual cultural, pedagogical and art-therapy practices are considered. Throughout the text, traditional music of peoples of the world is delineated in a unifying culture study perspective, from autochthonous traditions to modern ethnic culture.

This article will analyze the concept of “French identity” in the theory of French researchers. Then we will consider the reflection of its main “pillars” in modern advertising. The concepts of different researchers differ from each other. The article deals with the theories of F. Braudel, R. Debray and P. Veil. Among the most important factors of French identity are: the French language and culture, a positive assessment of the French revolution, the principle of equality, respect for history and the past, a preference for words rather than images, and a cautious attitude to absolute happiness. They say that advertising is “a cultural weapon of economic domination and an economic weapon of cultural domination”. The ad appeals to all French people, so it would be interesting to see how it reflects the appeal to French identity. This is the purpose of this article. Modern advertising creates a new mythology. It not only reflects what is deep in the subconscious of the nation, but also creates its own new culture, drawing material not always from the native soil. The influence of not just globalization, but specifically American culture in this area is not in doubt: this is the culture of smiles, and the preference for a visual series of informative, and some iconic elements of mass culture (music, movies). However, you can feel the spirit of France in other things that are not always obvious: themes, symbols, sound design. The conclusion is also drawn in the article about new trends in modern advertising that bring to the forefront such human values as altruism and concern for the world around us.

The article is devoted to the study of the creative principles of the Russian opera director Boris Alexandrovich Pokrovsky, which he developed in the Chamber Musical Theater. The main content of the article is an analysis of the directorial concept of B.A. Pokrovsky. This issue has not been thoroughly investigated and requires further research. The relevance of the article is due to the processes occurring in the modern musical theater as a cultural phenomenon and is related to the functioning, social representation, stylistic and dramatic features of the genre. The fundamental changes taking place in the methodology of the stage interpretation of the classical and modern opera composition are a reflection of the powerful transformations of the value foundations of culture. In this regard, the scientific study of the unique creative method of Boris Pokrovsky as a cultural phenomenon can serve as a basis for identifying specific mechanisms for translating axiological characteristics of culture into artistic principles and synthesizing traditional and innovative interpretations of the director. Boris Pokrovsky was an outstanding stage director. He is best known as the stage director of the Bolshoi Theatre between 1943 and 1982 and as the founder of the Chamber Music Theater in Moscow. He put on stage many rare and even unknown operas. The phenomenon of the theatre is still a mystery to the theatre critics and art historians, whereas the methods of the director lend themselves to analysis and are disclosed in the article.

The paper belongs to a series of articles with a focus on mental models, as construed and actualized in discourse and embodied in texts. Identity is treated as a type of the above-mentioned mental models. Supporting the constructivist stance on identity (in R. Brubaker and F. Cooper’s terms), the author postulates that identity is fragmented, multiple and fluid, being molded and interpreted in discourse, and a function of various historical and sociocultural factors. Using “Quichotte”, a 2019 novel by S. Rushdie, who represents postcolonial literature, the author argues that constructivist stance on identity is a rightful and fruitful approach to exploring identity construction through the prism of fictional texts, the latter seen as results of discursive activity. The purpose of the study is to analyze the writer’s essentially multilevel reflection on multicultural identity in the novel within the novel, taking into account the perspectives of different characters, and describe the means of multicultural identity construction. The conclusion is made that the constructivist approach to understanding identity does not hinder a researcher’s examination of the ways human self-understandings crystallize in texts.

The article discusses the characteristic features and categories of the short story genre and the levels of translation analysis of such texts from the point of view of theoretical understanding of various aspects of literary translation. The purpose of our study is to consider the existing approaches to the translation analysis of the literary text as a whole, to correlate them with the format of the short story genre, and to justify the need for developing a translation strategy for this genre. The research is based on the data extracted from the analysis of 42 short stories by a German writer Wolfgang Borchert, the translation of which into Russian is currently being done by the authors of this article. The categories selected as relevant for the translation process are the categories of chronotope, dynamics, and narrator. The chronotope reproduces the spatio-temporal picture of the world and organizes the composition of the work. The dynamics is associated with both the generation and perception of the content of the text. The examined components include the components of the text dynamics such as the plot movement and statics, neutrality and expression of the style of speech, the economy and redundancy of language tools, the pragmatics of direct and indirect speech. The narrator is a mediator between the author and the reader, the fictional creator of the fictitious world of a work of art. One of the main tasks of the translation analysis of an original text is to identify these categories and their means of expression, and find means for their parallel deployment in the translation text.

The article deals with one of the most complicated aspects of the theory of artistic translation, i.e. recreation of the speech portrayal of a literary character in another language and within a different culture underlying it. The material under analysis is Mikhail Bulgakov’s landmark novel The Master and Margarita and two of its widely acknowledged translations produced by Michael Glenny (1967) and Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1997). The text of the novel abounds with lexical diminutives of all kinds, which enabled us to put forward a hypothesis that diminutives underlie and inform the complex multilayer system of the characters of the novel and their speech portrayals. Thus, diminutiveness is viewed as a linguistically relevant personal index. The research has shown that within the framework of the novel, expressive diminutives possess a large indexical capacity to identify and typify the characters as ‘us’ and ‘them’ as well as provide a rich source of humour and comic relief for those characters who, like Woland’s entourage or the narrator himself, are good at changing masks and voices when confronted with ‘them’. Due to the asymmetry of the Russian and English morphological systems, consistent recreation of the characters’ speech portrayals based on lexical diminutives, does not seem possible in translation, which does not preclude, however, occasionally finding excellent translation solutions.

The article focuses on the evolution, some principles and methods of pronunciation norm regulation in German-speaking countries. The author is aiming to analyze briefly the main features of the codification norm of the literary language in pronouncing dictionaries in historical retrospective. Special attention is paid to the fixation of exaggerated articulation, when the basis of the German pronounciation norm was the speech of actors in Germany (Bühnensprache ‘stage speech’); the systematization and codification of the pronunciation of professional radio and television announcers; the regularization of various forms functioning due to the convergence of the literary language and the oral speech. The macro- and microstructure of some pronouncing dictionaries of the 20th century and current ones, the representation of different sound units, specifics of native and of foreign word pronunciation, changes in the transcription and in the system of labels etc. are described. The paper also raises the problem of dictionary codification and the reflection of standard pronounciation variants in the German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria, etc.). As a result of the study, the author comes to the conclusion regarding the changes in the methodology of norm systematization and the dynamics of trends in the lexicographic codification of pronunciation norms of the German language.