THEORETICAL REASONING BEHIND THE USE OF ECOLINGUISTIC APPROACH IN THE ENGLISH-UKRAINIAN DIRECTION OF MEDICAL INTERPRETING

Abstract

The presented study provides theoretical reasoning for the validity of ecolinguistic approach in the English-Ukrainian direction of the medical interpreting. The ecolinguistics is a relatively new field of bilingual studies dealing with the role of language in the individual’s interaction with the environment in order to ensure the sustainability; in this regard, we observe its intersection with biomedical culture, i.e. the context of medical interpreting enacted. The ecointerpreting, along with the ecosystemic interpreting theory enabling the former, has on its disposal a range of strategies and tactics naturally built in the functioning of medical interpreting and reflecting the following principles: dynamic and balance; integrity and relevance; ecoesthetics; interpreter’s ethics; accentuated unity/diversity. The successful use of ecolinguistic approach in medical interpreting results in the ecomedical transgenre, i.e. discourse obtaining new functions through rendering. The aim of our study was to substantiate the hypothesis of the ecomedical transgenre abounding in foreignization rather than domestication of the target texts, reflected in the strategy and ruling ecosystemic principles of translation. The choice of English-Ukrainian direction allowed us to trace the source biomedical culture’s interference, rise of the intra- and interlinguistic hybridity attending the realization of informative function by the medical discourse viewed though the ecolinguisic prism. However, one cannot exclude the complex of subjective translator’s preferences, translation’s objective and circumstances, target audience, text type and translator’s biomedical knowledge scope delineating the translator’s strategies and tactics. Out of a wide range of ideational target text models, the translator differentiates elements of unity/diversity allowing them to produce a mosaiced ecosystem of target biomedical linguoculture by means of replacing or transforming the existing concepts, or whenever they are absent, by means of their borrowing, calquing and descriptive rendering of their equivalents from the source biomedical linguistic habitat.