Sociocultural Credo of Modern Translator in Digital Communication Environment

Abstract

The article is based on the idea that, in a digital communicative environment, there are changes in the structure of the human-translator activity and functions, some of which are transferred to the machine translation. The aim of the research is to find ways of translation and meta-translation activities integration in the cognitive translation space and speech space of the translation discourse. This requires the coordination of the translation discourse with existing digital platforms, development of new language technologies oriented towards a high-quality product that ensures successful interlingual, intercultural, and interpersonal interaction. The methodological basis of the research is the concept of translation space which is based on a synergetic approach to translation involving harmonization of the source and target meanings, i.e., their adequacy and equivalence. The theoretical basis of the study is the notion of an epistemic situation as an extralinguistic basis of a text with ontological, methodological, and axiological components. The ontology of translation is represented by the idea of cognitivism, methodology — by synergy, axiology — by harmony. The result of the study is the correlation between the subject-centric and text-centric functions of a human-translator developing their reflexive, empathic, and other cognitive abilities which cannot be delegated to machine translation. There is transposition process of translator linguistic persona functions when the translator retains all subject-centric functions, whereas part of text-centric functions are performed by translation software. At this time, the social and cultural responsibility of the translator increases, since translation is assigned by a human and performed for a human.