Vol 11, No 1 (2020)

The present paper deals with some cases of the modernization of the Bible texts, especially created in the second part of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries (although the elements of the latter may be found in earlier versions including those with the unofficial status of “national Bibles”). The expansion of modernization is usually connected with E. Nida`s theory of the dynamic / functional equivalence; at the same moment its direct influence is obvious enough. The actuality of the theme for the theory and practice of translation is caused by the following factors: 1. the richness and variety of the Bible translations, the history of which counts more than two thousand ears; 2. the necessity to take into account the referential part of the text on one hand, and its pragmatic and appellative functions on the other; that may lead to the collision between them when the translator has to choose the strategy and tactics of his work; 1. the acceptance of the text as “inspired by God” among the believers, that may provoke a negative relation towards some moments, which are treated as the divergence from the source text or even its distortion. The paper is based on the representative sample taken from Bible translations (both “traditional” and modern) in Russian, English and German. The corresponding variants, as well as their estimation in special and popular works are analyzed. The authors give an attempt to define some features that give the possibility to treat the text as modernized one. Although the said method is used quite often as the means to reach the adequacy of translation, the question of its limits is controversial enough.

The article makes an attempt to comprehend the cognitive-semantic approach to the Chinese language in the framework of its teaching and study in higher education, taking into account features contrasting to the Russian language. The main theoretical postulates of the Chinese language-study were formulated by the Russian sinologists in line with formal structural paradigms based on materials of Western languages and their level of language organization. This approach is reflected in most Chinese language textbooks. In this regard, the Chinese language is taught according to the patterns of teaching Western languages. This approach does not allow to fully master the language, as it does not take into account the semantic and cognitive disproportion of the basic units of languages. The basic unit of the Russian language is the word as its nominative and at the same time the main speech unit. In the Chinese language, according to our observations and analysis of the relevant literature, this role belongs mainly to a more fractional substantive unit, which in the dictionary, in the nomination, acts as the main unit of the language division of the world, and in speech can also act as a simple word and as part of more complex formation - words or phrases. In writing, this unit is presented in the form of a «zi» hieroglyph, figuratively or otherwise denoting certain objects of reality and conceptualizing them, which allows us to consider these «zi» as expressors of minimal concepts of Chinese linguistic thinking. For the first time in Russian linguistics, the article addresses issues related to these basic units in connection with teaching issues. At the present stage, there are practically no textbooks or techniques aimed at mastering these specific Chinese language units. The authors make an attempt to attract the attention of sinologists to this problem and to reconsider the existing views in a new cognitive-semantic vein. In this context, the necessity of reorienting teaching that reproduces the methodological and linguistic orientations applied in relation to the study of Indo-European languages to methodological orientations corresponding to the essential characteristics of the Chinese language as consistently isolated in type and specifically orientational in terms of mental and cultural grounds is substantiated. In this regard, there marked relevant issues are there proposed some ways to resolve them.

Semantic assimilation is a many-sided and a multidimensional phenomenon assuming a number of analysis approaches. The article is a study of the semantic borrowing process due to either graphical or phonetic identity of lexical units. It discusses general semantic transformations of the English language borrowings alongside with the examples of semantic anglicisms in the French Internet discourse. The global tendency is that the French language is daily receipting quite a number of English words the Internet discourse being one of the leading media. To specify the borrowing patterns in the French language at the semantic level the net forum genre is chosen as a specific combination of oral and written speech features giving a most outstanding and evident picture of all linguistic tendencies. The work is an attempt to define what a semantic anglicism is and what linguistic mechanisms are involved in the process when French lexemes undergo semantic transformations due to their either graphical or phonetic likeness to English ones. The research topicality is conditioned by the nature of the global Internet discourse itself the latter being the speech type abundant in all kinds of borrowings anglicisms in particular. The research background is the legal French policy to defend the national language and the French linguists struggle against anglicisms overwhelming penetration into French. The analysis is also held through experimental French native speakers interviewing for the excessive use of English words and its expediency. The research methods are structural-semantic, comparative, statistical. The units under study are English language semantic borrowings in the French internet forum held by native French language speakers.

Research article titles constitute a special type of text - concise, clear, and informative. The specificity of article titles is determined by a number of factors such as the object of research, the author’s personal style, academic tradition, the field of study among them. Today, article titles from different scientific areas are in the focus of scientific attention. This article presents the results of a linguistic analysis aimed at determining similarities and differences of research article titles from journals on petroleum science. The theoretical value has the descriptive analysis of technical article titles which can further be compared with titles from other areas of research. According to the obtained results, the titles were 15 words on average. The overwhelming majority (98%) of the titles had a nominative character; 2% were subject-predicate sentences, mainly, interrogative. Words were seven characters long, on average. Nouns, function words and adjectives were the most frequently occurred word classes; on the contrary, numerals, adverbs and verbs - the least frequent words. The most common punctuation marks were hyphens, commas, and colons, indicating the complexity of technical terms, enumeration and elaboration of the object of research and geography of petroleum sites. Names of petroleum reservoirs, formations and basins with their location specification, multisyllabic professional terms and abbreviations, constituting 30% of the article titles’ lengths on the average, can be considered special features of article titles on petroleum science. For this reason, a long title is typical of petroleum-related research articles. Additionally, more articles were devoted to richer petroleum reserves.