Innovative Dynamic Matrix-Type Learning Environment Based on the Example of the St. Petersburg School of Conference Interpreting and Translation, Herzen University, Russia

The paper examines an innovative cluster-type matrix model for training interpreters and translators, based on recent developments in text and pragmatics theory, as well as on the scenario approach in education. The aim is to create a single, multifaceted space for open interpreter and translator training with an anthropological focus, drawing on the achievements in Russian teaching culture and best world practices, including a system of feedback from employers, to enable a flexible response to the needs of the society. To achieve the aim, an innovative interactive system of intensive interpreter and translator training has been developed based on a cluster principle and continuous education quality monitoring. At the heart of the system are a scenario strategy and a text typology approach. What is unique about the St Petersburg School of Conference Interpreting and Translation (SCIT)’s project is the fact that it is not just an educational programme or a system or an algorithm, but a dynamic matrix-type learning environment.It is a flexible model for professional retraining that presupposes a range of basic skills and can fill any gaps in the general translators’ competence and current performance by applying the professional environment matrix. The cluster approach provides a combination of in-person, distant and independent learning components, as well as increased transparency of the educational and professional spaces, opening up future employment prospects.The ‘diffuse matrix’ version of the innovative matrix principle in education underlies the diversity of methods employed by SCIT: methodological pluralism, dominant in the process of training, implies a combination of diverse techniques developed by different authors for the matrix, making it most flexible and the whole approach – customer tailored. It should be pointed out that the external diversity is strictly regulated and targeted by the project’s creators by means of a monitoring mechanism.The future of the model is seen in its use in Russia and other countries to train highly professional interpreters and translators in other spheres (for example, audiovisual translation). It could also be used at the final stage of higher vocational training; as a standard mechanism for improving professional skills and retraining; as well as a social harmonising element (creating new links among academic, educational, and professional activities).

The Mode of Intentionality of the Russian Language Personality through the Prism of Associative Grammar

The article states that the mode of intentionality, being a socio-cultural phenomenon, manifests itself in the language personality in the form of its socio-communicative attitudes. In comparison with subconscious sets of the “general cultural script” which motivate and support the functioning of a socio-cultural system as a whole, the sociocommunicative attitudes of the language personality are much more flexible, susceptible to multiple changes in the social network of communication. The socio-communicative attitudes of the language personality are studied with the units of analysis that can be called semantic accentuations embodied in the multiplicity and multidimensionality of links in the human associative-verbal network (AVN). Yu. N. Karaulov’s ideas about the complementarity of word-changing, word-forming and semantic variability in the AVN of the Russian language personality (RLP) are developed and tested in the article on new materials in connection with the multiplicity of ways of concentrating meaning. Using the latest experimental materials of the associative-verbal database SIBAS 1 (2007–2013) and SIBAS 2 (2014– 2021), the author puts to the test different techniques of vector analysis, both on the entire array of associates and within individual associative fields (AFs). These techniques include: an automatic generation (extraction from the entire array of associates) of the AFs of the studied word-forming units; a comparative psychoglossic analysis of the current diachronic dynamics of the AFs of the selected stimuli; constructing vectors of lexico-grammatical variation of the reactions in these AFs against the background of their semantic vectors; extracting particular word-changing and word-forming paradigms from the entire array of associates with a subsequent analysis of their contribution to the concentration of meanings, etc. Such methods show different entrances to the AVN for access to the same points of concentration of meaning and help to assess the contribution of the dissipated throughout the network associative grammar to the formation of semantic accentuations of the RLP. Hypothetically, it seems possible to imagine the construction of the fluctuation dynamics of an associative-verbal hypernetwork (AVHN) of the RLP on the combination of accentuation vectors of its subsystems (networks of word-changing, word-forming or semantic variability) in the current diachrony and historical retrospective.

New Translation of the First Nibelungenlied Adventure into Russian

This article analyzes the existing translations of the German medieval epic poem Nibelungenlied into Russian. Russian translations, made by M. I. Kudryashev in 1889 and Yu. B. Korneev in 1972, were based on the outdated publication of the Nibelungenlied edited by K. Bartsch. The edition by K. Bartsch is rather a compilation than a critical study. The basis for this edition was the manuscript B, in which K. Bartsch made a great number of amendments. That is why K. Bartsch’s edition cannot be regarded as a suitable source for translation. In contrast, the translation by Yu. B. Korneev contains a number of factual inaccuracies and additions caused by the translator’s aim to keep the original metre. The article shows that it is necessary to make a new Russian translation of the Middle High German masterpiece. The article provides a review of possible problems facing a translator: accuracy of translation; making comments that give missing information or explain unclear places in the text. It argues in favour of overt translation with comments that help readers to understand the text which is a product of both another culture and another time. The article features a new translation of the first chapter of the Nibelungenlied (the manuscript B) with comments.

Image of Russia in French-Language Comics

This article initiates research on the representation of Russia in French comic books. From 1849 to the present about 400 volumes have been published. In this paper, the notion “comics about Russia” include: a) a book of comics in which the action takes place either in the tsarist Russia, the USSR or contemporary Russia, b) a book in which a character or a place of the above period are involved. After an overview of the types of books and genres of comics about Russia (documentary, historical, adventure, science fiction, comical, as well as literary adaptations), an analysis of the visual aspect of comic books, mainly the covers, is given. Such recurring elements as snow, red color, five-pointed star, trains, blood, weapons, beautiful girls, ugly old ladies, and old cars are considered. We discuss the reasons for the practical absence of such stereotypes as black caviar, bears and some others. Then we analyze the role of the Russian language in the realization of the image of Russia, on the example of borrowed words, toponyms, anthroponyms, and utterances. Сyrillic, transliterated text and insertion of certain letters from Cyrillic into Latin are examined, as well as the presence or absence of translation and its correctness. The author underlines cases in which nonexistent toponyms, names and surnames, remotely resembling Russian words, are used. The question is whether such errors are accidental or indicate the authors' evident lack of interest in the adequate depiction of the reality. At the end of the paper the author proposes a frame for the analysis of any comic book about Russia. Apart from the mentioned above, this frame takes into account such aspects as characteristics of the "Russian" personages and their actions. Hopefully, the frame will make it possible to observe the evolution of the image of Russia, the link between stereotypes and the type of comic book as well as to compare the same image in French mass-media, literature, and movies. In the future we would like to find out whether the use of these stereotypes comes from the authors' insufficient knowledge of the Russian reality, or from their intention to create and reinforce the existing stereotypical image of this country.

Nominal Constructions of the Vertical Level in the Yakut Language

At present, the grammatical and semantic study of nominal constructions as a means of conveying metrological concepts is believed to reveal the general picture of the study of the functional grammar of the Yakut (Saha) language. Widespread constructions obtained by the method of continuous sampling from Yakut imaginative literature and folklore serve as the material of the research. The purpose of the article is to identify the structural and semantic features of the expression of nominal structures on the material of the Yakut language. As the subject matter of the research, we chose constructions of a nominal type, expressing the height / growth of an object, the depth of substances, and the length of hanging objects.It is postulated that in the Yakut language, typical constructions with the instrumental affix -nan and with the dative affix -ar, -gar in combination with the postpositions dieri, dyly and tiye ʻdo, up to’ as means of expressing the level differ from each other not only in their structure, but also semantically. To identify the grammatical and semantic features of nominal constructions with the meaning of the level, different techniques have been used: morphoglossing, taking into account the linguistic specificity of the language, based on the Leipzig rules for the representation of texts, metalanguage transmission of the meaning of the level, description of semantic groups and subgroups, semantic analysis of the nominal structure.The basic nominal and postpositional constructions with the meaning of the level are presented; the component composition of the studied units is described; considered and described is also the semantic structure of qualitative-adverbial units with quantitative meaning. Based on the material of the studied units, it has been established that the situation of measuring the vertical level has its own cognitive significance, which is mostly associated with anthropocentrism. The main names of body parts with the instrumental affix -nan, capable of acting as level indicators, except for harah ʻeyesʼ, haas ʻebrowsʼ, uos ʻlip(s)ʼ, tis ʻtooth(s)ʼ, and other parts of a person’s face are revealed. Constructions with the instrumental case preposition -nan are more static and are mainly used with the verbs of being; the constructions with the dative affix -gar and the postpositions dyly, dieri, tiye ʻdo, up toʼ show more dynamics, thanks to the verbs of movement and achievement.

The Influence of Political Discourse on the Formation of the Language Personality of a Politician

The current paper sums up the results of the dissertation research conducted by the author at the Moscow Region State University which was supervised by Professor Ye. A. Sorokina, Doctor of Philology. The relevance of the chosen research topic is determined by anthropocentrism of modern linguistics which manifests itself in progressive development of personology, including linguistic personology and political linguistic personology as one of the emerging scientific disciplines that is not yet fully separated from political linguistics. This article looks at some new issues of political linguistics, one of which is the notion of linguopersoneme, and suggests several types of linguistic personemes: the mythmaker, the actor, the alarmist, the gentleman (the lady), the aggressor, and the marginal. Most of these notions and terms were used in our previous articles and yet it is only now that we present a more or less holistic vision of the complex and versatile phenomenon of the language personality of a politician. In our opinion, the language personality of a politician is a variety of a creative professional language personality, to some extent comparable to the people working in such professional spheres as show business, sport, art, etc. The language personality of a politician is formed in political discourse, as follows from the sociological theories by P. Bourdieu and M. Foucault. It was found that the main characteristics of political discourse manifest themselves in the politician’s language personality in a specific way, thus forming its structure, which up to this moment was predominately described in terms of Yu. N. Karaulov’s influential theory. These are verbal-semantic, cognitive and pragmatic levels of the language personality.

Mnemonic Aids in Linguodidactic Discourse

The article examines modern English memory aids as part of linguodidactic discourse in teaching English, and the patterns of mnemonic devices represented by sentence, acronym, abbreviation and verse. The empirical material of the research incorporates 54 units. The focus is made on an extensive number of mnemonics compiled as a meaningful text and the patterns of the devices in the form of a sentence, and the mnemonic acronyms homonymous to general vocabulary, i. e. homoacronyms. At that, the mnemonic aids which are not similar to other words, are not so often used as mnemonic devices. The mnemonic devices in the paper have been studied on the basis of the English and Russian sources published in the 21st century.Mnemonic devices have become part of research only in recent years. Previously mnemonics were studied within the framework of pedagogical discourse in teaching Geography, Biology, Astronomy, History, and Music. In the present research the mnemonics related to teaching English were distributed by structure. Afterwards, mnemonic sentences and the mnemonics homonymous to the existing lexemes were identified. The analysis of the structures showed the domination of the mnemonics structured as sentences and homoacronyms. 54 units of mnemonics under study were presented in the form of 22 sentences, 3 verses, 17 acronyms and 12 abbreviations. The most common structure proved to be a sentence, while the least common one was verse. The mnemonics considered contained only 13 units which were not sentences or homoacronyms: 12 abbreviations and 1 acronym of primary nomination. The examination of the structures showed the domination of the mnemonics organized as a sentence or a homoacronym. The research confirms the assumptions made earlier on the frequent use of sentence mnemonics, which, as it turned out, exceed the shares of the other mnemonic patterns. In their turn, homoacronyms made up a larger share compared to acronyms and abbreviations with no reference to general English words or verse. Thus, we can consider these structures (sentences and homoacronyms) within English teaching as part of pedagogical discourse. To sum it up, while compiling mnemonic aids, preference should be given to sentences or homoforms based on the vocabulary, while verses and abbreviations might be used economically. The article has also revealed additional features of mnemonics, in particular applying asyndeton in acronyms and abbreviations, the average number of 3 or 4 components in a mnemonic aid. Studying such structures will contribute to examining shortened forms and functioning of mnemonics in linguodidactic discourse.

Udareniye: Diachronic and Lexicographic Description of the Linguistic Term and its Breaking Away from the Greek and Church Slavonic Tradition

The article is devoted to the study of the Russian linguistic term “udareniye” (“stress” / “accent”) from the historicolinguistic, etymological and lexicographic viewpoints. Currently, there are hardly any studies analyzing the term’s semantic development or attempts to present its semantic structure in a dictionary, based on textual and lexicographic sources ranging from the end of the 16th to the end of the 19th century, that would make it possible that would make it possible to trace the semantic changes of the term in the course of time. The existing studies mainly address the the issues of terminology developed in individual authors’ grammars, or describe the terminology of grammars related to a certain period of time or a specific epoch. The purpose of this article is to systematize etymological information about the term “udareniye”, to conduct an historico-linguistic analysis of its semantics, starting with the first Russian grammars and lexicons. The research uses comparative, definitional, etymological, semantic and lexicographic methods. The semantic structure of the term “udareniye”, when taking into account its two main meanings (emphasizing of some syllable in the word with voice and reflection of such an emphasis in writing by graphical means, e.g. diacritics), begins to take shape from its first written fixation in 1591 in Adelphotes and ends by 1830, when grammarians finally stopped associating the Russian accent, uniform by nature, with the sound length and modulations of the tone, and focused their attention on the study of intensity (pronouncing power), which can be regarded as the main acoustic feature of the stressed syllable in languages with dynamic stress. By this time, the type of the Russian stress stops being identified with the Greek and Church Slavonic patterns and the attempts to uncritically borrow the corresponding terminological nominations with their forms and meanings from Greek into Russian come to an end. The term “udareniye” got probably for the first time its lexicographic entry at the beginning of the 18th century due to Polikarpov-Orlov who described its meaning 1 in his dictionary. In its meaning 2 – based on the Greek-Church Slavonic tradition, – the term is found in almost all the text sources examined by the author, starting from Adelphotes, that is from the end of the 16th century. As for its first lexicographic fixation, it took place in 1763 in Poletika’s dictionary.

The Adaptation of Loan Interjection wow in the Russian Language through the Prism of Modern Explanatory Dictionary: From Slang to Everyday Speech, from Everyday Speech to Terminology

The article considers the adaptation process of the loan interjection wow that was borrowed into Russian from American English in the early 1990s and at first was mostly used as slang, but later on it entered everyday speech. The research is carried out as a part of the project aimed at exploring the lexis of the modern Russian language, i.e. its main functional and chronological varieties and lexical categories with the use of “The Dictionary of the 21st Century Russian Language”. The novelty and specificity of the investigation lies in a comprehensive study of Russian lexis using a new approach “from dictionary to language” in contrast to the traditional one “from language to dictionary”. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate the potential of this principle in practice, that is to describe some interesting phenomena in modern Russian using the material of several entries, – namely вау (wow), вау- (wow-), вау-эффект (wow effect), вау-фактор (wow factor) – selected from the dictionary mentioned above. This series clearly demonstrates the phenomena typical of modern Russian, that is the blurring of the boundaries between colloquial speech and other stylistic registers and the active interpenetration of words from one stylistic variety to another. The analysis of the dictionary entries revealed the gradual process of penetration of the interjection wow into the Russian language through its adaptation. It may be converted into a noun, a predicative or an analytic adjective, it may be reduplicated to indicate the intensity of surprise/ admiration, it may be used as a productive derivational element and even as a component of some special terms. This process is extraordinary for the Russian language, since, firstly, it affects one of the most stable groups of lexical items, and secondly, it is associated with acquiring a terminological meaning by a word component initially used as an exclamation to express a certain emotion. These new linguistic processes are largely due to the influence of the English language. This influence is so great that we can observe not only an active penetration of the Anglo-American interjection wow into the Russian everyday speech – emotive interjections were hardly ever borrowed – but also its integration into the Russian word-formation system.

Diachronic Changes in the Frequency of Color Designation in Russian Poetic Texts

We propose a statistical-diachronic approach to the description of color designations in poetic texts in Russian. Methods of corpus linguistics and the semantic annotation of the Russian National Corpus (RNC) applied in the research have revealed certain patterns of change in the frequency ` in poetic texts from 1750 to 1999. A quantitative characteristic of the poetic corpus of the RNC is presented by decades of the period under study. We also provide a general description of its poetry corpus (number of texts, number of authors, searching techniques, the semantic annotation, etc.). Also presented is the authors' classification of adjectives with the color tag of the semantic annotation.The study has revealed the RNC inconsistency in the assignment of color tags during the semantic annotation. In the authors’ opinion, this defect could affect the results of the study; however, the spotted tendencies in frequency behavior of color adjectives seem to be reliable.The research method is based on the comparison of statistical indicators for each decade in the specified range. Accordingly, the charts are plotted with reference to the average values for the range, unlike the RNC Charts tool, where a chart is based on the points for each year with a smoothing coefficient. Also, the indicators in the poetic corpus are compared with the corresponding data in the prose corpus. It has been reliably established that in the texts of the poetry corpus the frequency of color designations is higher than in the texts from basic, newspaper and oral corpora regardless of the part of speech the words belong to. The highest frequency (IPM) values of all adjectives that have the color tag of the RNC semantic annotation are observed in the last decades of the 19th - first decades of the 20th centuries. The frequency behavior of adjectives belonging to different classes differs significantly in different periods. In the texts of the 18th century, the analogous adjectives (or the adjectives of secondary nomination, such as златой (golden), янтарный (amber), etc.) prevail. In the texts of the 19th century adjectives – quasi-colors, (such as светлый (light), тёмный (dark), бледный (pale), etc.) are most frequent whereas in the texts of the 20th century the color adjectives per se have the highest frequency. While ranking the data selected from all the periods in the descending order, the first 28 ranks were occupied by the adjectives denoting achromatic colors – black and white. The article also defines prospects for our further research of color designations in Russian: specifying classification of color adjectives, looking at statistical aspects of their polysemy, and comparison of their use frequency by individual authors.