Estimation of transfer of key information at interpretation (on the material of translation of speech of the political leader)

Chen Qiming

This article is devoted to evaluating the informative value of interpretation (based on the speech of the political leader, President of Russia V.V. Putin, at the international forum “One Belt, One Way” in 2017). The work was done in order to set the quality level, which is determined on the basis of several categories, in particular, the category of completeness. The relevance of the article is due to the ambiguous status of the named category, which today does not have a definite answer to the question: what degree of completeness is sufficient. The assessment of the completeness of the translation in this article is based on the theory of information content of texts described by the Soviet translator R.K. Minyar-Beloruchev in the work "Theory and Methods of Translation". The author of the publication analyzes the transmission of unique information in a translating language according to the algorithm proposed by the scientist by performing speech segmentation of a fragment of a politician’s speech, highlighting information quanta in calculated speech segments, counting transmitted quanta of key information, and considering translation techniques implemented by a specialist translator on specific material. The scientific novelty of the presented article lies in the fact that the theoretical foundations developed by the Soviet scientist were tested on a text that for the most part has elements of a journalistic style pronounced within the framework of an official business environment. The article discusses the alleged reasons for the translator to exclude key information from the fabric of the text in the translating language.

Keywords:interpretation, quality assessment, translation criticism, category of completeness, information theory.