PROBLEMS OF TEXT INTERPRETATION IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION: THE SOCIO-CULTURAL ASPECT

With the growth of the world economic space in the age of globalization the issue of analysing media texts has become one of the burning questions of modern linguistics. On the one hand, the Internet being an integral part of our lives, e-mail, video-conferencing and other impressive technological breakthroughs allow a splendid opportunity to draw a link between people of different nationalities, cultures, traditions and make it possible to know more about each other. On the other hand, some examples of the translation of the English media texts into Russian prove the fact that there is no adequate perception of the information that is contained in them. One of the reasons for this misunderstanding is the excessive influence of these two languages on each other. The examples of such influence are widely found in contemporary advertising discourse and consist in unjustified borrowings used by translators. On the one hand, the appearance of new words expands the vocabulary of the Russian speakers. On the other hand, unjustified frequent use of foreign terms to denote certain realia erases the authenticity of the translating language. Another factor influencing the correct interpretation of the English media texts is background knowledge as an extralinguistic component of communication. The analysis of practical materials reveals that background knowledge — mutual knowledge of the realia by both an addresser and an addressee — has a significant impact on the process of interpretation of the English-language media texts by the representatives of the Russian-speaking cultural and linguistic community. The examples of the translation of the English media texts into Russian adduced in the present paper show that ignorance of the realia which stand beyond a statement leads to a communicative failure in most cases. It should be noted that there exist many ways of translating phraseological units from one language into another, but it is necessary to bear in mind that the process of interpretation is not just a simple selection of the equivalent linguistic matches, but an arduous work which consists in a thorough insight into a language itself, as well as the life of its speakers, their traditions and cultural peculiarities.

Keywords: media text, interpretation, phraseological units, background knowledge