The interpretative approach as a platform for forming would-be translators’ professional intelligence

Abstract

The article deals with theoretical and practical issues of forming would-be translators and interpreters’ professional intelligence. The concept of a translator’s professional intelligence is regarded as a structured element of cognitive skills. A person’s intelligence is a mental process interpreted by P. Guilford as an ability of processing information. A translator’s professional intelligence uses mental and physiological devices such as memory, attention, imagination, reflection etc. and functions as a processor responsible for perceiving, comprehending and deverbalizing a source message. To form the above cognitive skill we have selected the interoretative theory of translation pioneered by French scholars D. Seleskovicz and M. Lederer. This model involves a transition between two one-language communication acts and rendering the sense of the source message without focusing on its linguistic form. We believe that this approach is the best to demonstrate the concept of translation between languages (senses) and alienates it from instructions put into translation machines. Our organizational and didactic model is to use a pre-translation stage to form the operations performed by a translator’s professional intelligence (perception, comprehension, procession, and understanding). It is the period of time when a translator is focused on reading and analyzing actively the source message and preparing for generating a new text in a different language. The intellectual processing of the source discourse is due to produce a mental substance to be transcoded and reverbalized. That is what a translator’s professional intelligence is all about.