On some hermeneutical aspects of translation

Abstract

Contemporary Russian translatology tends to be an interdisciplinary science attempting to embrace all important aspects of translation (semiotic, informational, hermeneutic, cultural, etc.). In the last few years it has focussed on (1) the differentiation between text and message, meaning and sense, and translationally relevant and irrelevant information; (2) the clarification of the basic mechanisms of text production and comprehension; (3) the formulation of the notion of communicative competence and its role in communicative success and failure; (4) the description of such hermeneutically significant characteristics of the text as its informational redundancy and incompleteness, informational unambiguity (or determinacy) and ambiguity (or indeterminacy); (5) the clarification of causes of translational variability; (6) the classification of various types of inter‐ and intralanguage interference; and (7) the definition of the notion of the translational mode and the description of its submodes. Although some details in the above fields are to be specified or modified in the course of further research, the results obtained are instrumental for improving translation practice and teaching. Providing a deeper insight into the very nature of human communication and translation, they also contribute to the integration of various translational concepts into translatology. © 1997, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. All rights reserved.