Cognitive Consonance and Cognitive Dissonance as Determinants of Plurality in Translation of Shakespeare’s Plays

Abstract

The proposed paper presents the methodology of frame modelling for substantiating the phenomena of cognitive consonance and cognitive dissonance as the determining factors of Ukrainian retranslations of Shakespeare’s plays. By postulating the hypothesis that plurality in translation of the original text depends on the cognitive consonance or cognitive dissonance between the author and the translator, the author of the paper tends to extrapolate the concepts of cognitive consonance and cognitive dissonance to translation studies. Structuring the frame of the conceptual content of the lexical unit in the original text and its Ukrainian retranslations into such slots as reference, emotivity, imagery, evaluation, and stylistic colouring, the author of the paper tries to cover the most noticeable aspects of cognitive parameters of the translated text. It is argued that not only because of the difference in historical and cultural contexts, in which the original text and its retranslations are created, social and ideological peculiarities of the societies but also due to the translators’ personal worldviews, the translators can agree or disagree with the author’s ideas under the influence of cognitive consonance or cognitive dissonance and thus produce different translations. The research proves that different degrees of cognitive proximity between the lexical units in the original text and its Ukrainian retranslations are caused by consonance or dissonance between the cognitions of the author and translator/s. The highest degree of cognitive proximity of the original text and its retranslations is determined by cognitive consonance resulting in cognitive equivalents and/or cognitive analogues in translation; the lowest degree of cognitive proximity appears under the influence of cognitive dissonance resulting in cognitive variants.