THE TRANSLATION COURSE AT UNIVERSITY LEVEL: TEACHING HOW TO DETECT THE SEMANTIC CORE OF THE TEXT

Text meaning is a complex phenomenon, a peculiar blend of subjective and objective: on the one hand, as the representatives of the French school of discourse analysis debate, text meaning suggests a range of unlimited possibilities for a dialogue between the author and the reader, text meaning is multidimensional being spontaneous and ineffable, created at the moment of perception, influenced by the history and subconscious, conditioned by the interpreter’s creative personality; on the other hand, scientific achievements of cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics give evidence that cognitive nature of text creation and text interpretation allows the author and the reader to have common associations, analogies, to follow similar linguistic and logical rules of retrieving explicit and implicit information. Thus in each text there is a set of key elements representing its semantic core, which serves as the basis for interpreting a source text (ST) and then generating a target text (TT) in another language. Studying analytical operations of identifying key elements, comparing semantic cores of a ST and a TT based on them and using these operations in practical translation process may help students develop their interpretative competence, master effectively the process of rendering messages from the source language into the target one, improve translation quality. This paper is about the notion of the semantic core and its constituents, the procedure of detecting the semantic core of the text and their practical application to teaching one of the most significant professional competences of would-be translators how to investigate the relationships between source and target texts.