Some Techniques for Translator’s Text Processing Skills Development

Abstract

Translator’s professional skills development occurs in many respects due to cognitive processes development. The study of their formation within professional tasks performance caters to the needs of its effectiveness enhancement. The existing research of human perception and text processing skills can provide a framework for translation guidelines and translation-oriented text analysis guidelines, but is rarely employed for the sake of text analysis techniques development. The aim of this study is to work out a set of techniques which simultaneously addresses text processing skills and development of translator’s competencies, connected with source text comprehension. The resulting set of techniques was motivated by postmodernist approach to translation and its idea of text semantics instability. A few techniques employed the design of Münsterberg experiment on attention and Schulte tables which are used to identify the attention selectiveness, concentration and performance capacity. The succession of techniques in a set is built according to the three-step strategy of foreign language reading skills development that comprises before-reading, while-reading and after-reading phases. The paper presents an example set of tasks for one text; they include author’s communicative aims identification, anticipation, predicative structures and multilevel semantic links eliciting, textual semantic field identifying, analysis of alternative and invariant structural elements as imposed by the conventions of the genre.