Abstract:

The paper focuses on building the intercultural communicative competence of students at linguistic faculties majoring either in translation and interpretation or in pedagogical studies. Learning a language has become a multifaceted process over the past couple of decades, which is especially relevant for students studying the language to build a career in areas centered on humanities.

The paper proceeds from the assumption that nationally distinctive culture specifics are reflected in the language, therefore, its mastering through the acquaintance with culturally-weighed semantic units provides an opportunity to develop the competence in question, on the one hand, and excel in general language and strictly professional skills, on the other hand.

It is stated that although the students’ performance along the intercultural axis can be evaluated separately, with students training to become translators and interpreters it affects the following key areas: lack of knowledge of culture-specific items or notions is a major cause of rough distortions in lexical meaning at the level of lexical units, inability to convey the general message of an original statement in the target language, and interruptions/pauses/slowing down in consecutive and synchronous interpretation flow.

The authors narrow it down to words and expressions containing culture-specific material elements, or realia, as this particular kind of vocabulary pose a challenge for identification, understanding and translation due to the local overtone they contain and a large amount of background knowledge required for proper handling of these units. As such words and expressions have no direct equivalent in the target language, they are regarded as difficult even by those students who are familiar with these items, because every time they come across ralia in a text or a piece of oral speech, they have no “ready-made” solution for translation.

The common way of addressing this type of vocabulary is to discuss the theory of realia in the Theory of Translation or Lexicology and deal with practical examples every time they appear in the material covered in practical courses in the “as we go” mode. The paper lays out a different approach suggesting that a systematic targeted full-time module be included in the Speech Practice Course as early as Year 2 at least. The authors present a detailed description of each part of the module coupled with methods used to implement the strategy which provides for analytical processing of a literary work containing a lot of realia of different kinds (The Lord of the Rings by J. Tolkien) and several translation options (4 are available in the case of Tolkien), which are later extrapolated on other texts.

The paper outlines the results of an analytical study of the realia in the novel in question and shows how they were used to develop a three-part module for practising realia and their translation. The paper concludes that this approach allows students to learn how to study the culture of the source language country through realia; increase the pool of background knowledge; improve their professional skills

Keywords:

Realia, linguistic studies in pedagogy, culture-specific notions, intercultural communicative competence, teaching translation and interpretation.