Social and communicative characteristics of the translation association website

Abstract

The article deals with identifying and describing social and communicative characteristics of a translation association website as a genre of translators’ professional discourse. The relevance of the paper is due to the steadily growing translation market at the global level, which makes high demands on its participants, translators and their professional competences. It is determined that the content of websites of national translation associations is one of the sources of industry-specific specialised information. The content of websites of translation national associations in Great Britain, Russia and France is used as the material for the study. The paper uses the following methods: discourse analysis to identify the categories of translators’ professional discourse; the descriptive method to analytically describe institutional and personal components of the discourse under consideration; content analysis to determine general tendency of using social and communicative characteristics. The principles of identifying social and communicative characteristics of professional discourse on the basis of its hybrid nature are defined. It is established that it is useful to identify the characteristics of translators’ professional discourse as a primary institutional formation by the following parameters: participants, goal, objectives, strategies, tactics, chronotope, themes. As a result of the conducted research it was established: social and communicative characteristics of the hyper-genre of a translation association website are optimisation and improvement of translation activity; expert professionals and ordinary users (vectors of communicative interaction “agent-agent”, “agent-client”); marking of an expert status of participants; existential and phatic social and communicative strategies involved in the implementation of two objectives of the analyzed discourse (they are analysis and solution of topical industry issues; self-presentation); polythematicity of normative, business, educational, applied, news and recruiting character; asynchronous chronotope; using of language play means (metaphors, colloquial style, precedent texts).