Changing the Type of Predicate as a Means of Cognitive Adaptation in Translation

Abstract

The linguistic worldview is a reflection of the national cognitive worldview. ‘Worldview’ is often defined as a way of perceiving the surrounding reality, yet the way people perceive their personal inner world also reflects their national self-identification. It is difficult to compare how people of different nations experience emotions and perceive such experiences because these processes are not available for direct observation and objective assessment. The most complete representation of the way a person experiences a particular emotion can be found in fiction. Contrastive analysis of how this process is reflected in different languages can be based on a comparison of a literary text with its translation into another language, since, in this case, both texts present the same character in the same situations that cause certain emotions. To exclude the influence of the translator’s personality, in our analysis we have used three different translations of selected passages from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. A quantitative analysis of the means employed by the translators shows that representation of emotions in English does indeed reflect the way of perceiving the world that is typical of the national linguistic worldview as a whole. In all the three English texts, state predicates prevail over ac-tion predicates, and predicatively used adjectival words prevail over those used attributively. It means that emotional states are mostly perceived by English speakers as something that, while not permanent or inherent to a person, is, at the same time, static: less a process than a result of that process. In contrast, native speakers of Russian perceive emotional states as actions, and the Russian text reveals no inclination toward perceiving emotional states as personal characteristics, whether temporary or permanent. All these regularities are statistical and not absolute, which means that they reflect usage and not the linguistic norm, and, thus, the change of predicates in translation should be regarded as a way of cognitive adaptation rather than a structural transformation.