?
BLENDING PROCESSES IN TRANSLATION: MODELLING THE COGNITIVE MECHANISMS BEHIND TRANSLATION DECISION DIDACTICS
The research theme focuses on the creative component of translation. The translator's creative decisions are here defined as either appropriate, or possibly inadequate meanings being new to the target text. The theory of conceptual blending has been originally used in the study as a tool for analyzing high-entropy decisions in translation. The proposed translation model relying on this theory involves three stages. At the first stage, the translator is seen as a qualified reader, whose cognitive background of translation is being shaped through the translator's experience and knowledge. The second stage features the formation of the source space, the target space, and (if necessary) additional spaces that are, consequently, blended into the resulting space. At the third stage, the translator finalizes the discourse that, in turn, becomes a source of the recipient's variable associative conceptualizations. The proposed model laid the foundation for the hierarchy of translation integration levels that correlate with the typological scale of irregular/creative translation decisions. The advantages of the model include its explanatory potential in relation to the emergence of new semantic elements in translation, which evidently confirms the challenges of professional irrationality and intuition as a certain proved part of the research field of cognitive translation studies and translation didactics. High entropy is being tested in the study on the example of the fantasy genre as both a natural property and a result of literary translation.