Translation as a professional and creative activity: A metalinguistic perspective

The paper briefly reviews the achievements and problems in Translation Studies (TS) and the practical tasks TS face at present: teaching translation on a much larger scale, educating teachers of translation, and teaching translation students to think and translate professionally and creatively. To deal with these tasks, the paper proposes a new cognitive model of translation as a professional and creative activity and its practical application.

The model integrates two of the most prominent contemporary conceptions: Nikolay Ovchinnikov’s new cognitive theory of mind and Igor Mel’čuk and Jury Apresjan’s “Meaning ⇔ Text” model (of linguistic competence). The main idea of the paper is that translation is a creative linguistic activity and thus its professional acquisition needs professional and up-to-date (meta) linguistic knowledge.

Special attention is paid to TS terminology, its organization and application, since the main practical burden of modern TS is to provide a teacher of translation with basic and practice-oriented linguistic and background professional knowledge and terminology helpful in encouraging students to think over translation problems consciously and purposefully.