Cognitive Dominants And Shifts In Sociocultural Perspective In Literary Translation

Abstract

The paper aims to explore the notion of cognitive dominants in terms of their impact onto the translation process. This notion is well-timed, considering the urgent need to account for the unconscious when exploring culture-laden yet deeply subjective literary translation and to shift the research focus from the impersonal sociocultural onto the translator. Cognitive dominants, which are culture-modulated but belong with the individual’s mind, are claimed to drive attention, perception and construal operations throughout the translation act predominantly in the automatic (intransitive) mode of consciousness. The empiric-based section tests this hypothesis, summing up the findings of the study of a corpus of parallel texts in English and Russian, which was focused on textual manifestations of the intertwined cognitive patterns widely regarded as ‘signitive’ of the Russian sociocultural space. The study revealed persistent and consistent manifestation of these patterns in all the translations analyzed, including foreignizing ones, which allows to indeed regard them as culture-modulated dominants. Shifts in perspective they trigger proved to be bidirectional, blending target- and source-specific patterns in a complex way. That challenges a commonly held view that culture-related shifts in translation are primarily ethnocentric and are rooted in the translator’s ideological agenda, translation norms, target literary canon and other reflective parameters of the translation strategy. Finally, the findings of the study show that if applied to translation, the notion of dominants allows to trace the dynamicity of concepts regarded as ‘signitive’ of a certain culture and makes one to reconsider the idea of ‘cultural translation’.