Systemic and Creative Aspects of Translation: Psycholinguistic Approach

ABSTRACT The article deals with highlighting systemic and creative aspects of translation on the basis of psycholinguistic experiment. The topicality of the research is determined by the switch form text-oriented to activity-oriented development of modern Translation Studies which requires designing and implementing principally new methodological instruments. Translators’ decisions which demonstrate the elements of systemic and creative thinking were used as an object of the research while translation methods and means employed for the objectification of these decisions in translated texts served as a subject of the research. The aim of the research lies in an attempt to spot and consequently demonstrate systemic and creative manifestations in the translation of nonce formations which appear due to the coordination of translators’ decisions on both horizontal (i.e., for the elements of one variety / type / category) and vertical (i.e., for the elements of different varieties / types / categories) levels of textuality. For the realization of this aim, a four-stage psycholinguistic experiment was conducted in the course of which 95 semiprofessional informants translated the abstract from V. Nestaiko’s fairy tale from Ukrainian into English and later commented on some of their decisions. The conducted research allows to draw the conclusion that translators’ decisions concerning the methods and means of reproducing non-equivalent vocabulary clearly demonstrate the indications of systemic and creative thinking that jointly aim at providing for such emergent properties of translation as naturalness and fluency. Methodologically, conducting psycholinguistic experiments with the participation of MA students contributes to forming a more conscious approach to translation due to the necessity to coordinate different strategies on the textual level which stands as a main sign of systemic and creative thinkin