Psycholinguistic model of salience translation applied to paremia (on the example of Buryat-English correlations)

Abstract

The article suggests that state standards for general and vocational education should provide mandatory training in communication skills in Russian in various special fields. First of all, it is necessary to develop skills in how to use Russian as the state language for the Russian Federation. The acquired skills are expected to ensure reliable social communication between the authorities and citizens. The article presents basic requirements for Russian when used in legal acts: certainty, clarity, and intelligibility to a wide audience. The article provides results of a comprehensive study, carried out by St. Petersburg Univeristy, of legal acts issued in 2014– 2015 in eleven regions of the Northwestern Federal District of the Russian Federation. Types of speech errors found in the texts of these normative acts are singled out, and the significance of the errors is assessed from regarding the risk of social communication disorders. For this purpose we prepared a list of stylistic errors in business language. Among these: semantic violations of compatibility, wrong case forms, formal errors and semantic matching parts of a sentence, the prepositional selection error control, errors of usage, violation of stylistic unity and genre of the text. The evaluation of the significance of certain errors regarding risk to social communication disorders is provided. It is argued that the purpose of language policy in the field of education should improve the quality of oral and written language in various fields of professional activity. The article depicts the translation process in intercultural communication within a psycholinguistic approach, namely the model of salience translation developed by P. P. Dashinimaeva (2010, 2017a). According to this model, mental and speech stages occur as separate and asymmetric activation processes. This extends the stage of the original salience decoding, which includes three receptive versions of salience: natural salience-I, artificial version of salience-1 (of the addresser), and a version of salience-2 (of the addressee). The author applies the model to the translation of paremic units, which are classified as difficult-to-translate. Buryat-English correlations are used for the analysis. At the first stage of decoding, perception of the proverb evokes involuntary associations and images in the author’s mind that come out of his personal experience. At the next stage, the author “suppresses” these images and identifies the proverb’s didactic value, analyzing Buryat traditional values. At the last stage, he makes a pragmatic adaptation of the addresser’s version to the addressee’s, predicting the communicative effect. After analyzing the English behavior in different communicative situations, the author seeks English correlates with similar didactive value. The author then compares metaphorical images and ways of describing the situation in Buryat-English correlates and finally chooses the most appropriate English variant. In conclusion, the author provides several arguments that illustrate the reasonableness of using this model for the translation of paremic units.

Keywords:

psycholinguistic model of salience translation, paremia, prescription, Buryat-English correlations