Student perception of epistemic submissiveness in translation: a case study of future translators in Kazakhstan

Аннотация

The study is devoted to the subject of the epistemic submissiveness of future translators in the process of working with Central Asian archeological discourse including latent colonial markers. The work is based on the analysis of translation of archaeological binary oppositions in the incoming (English-Russian) and outgoing (Russian-English) vectors. A student translation corpus (STC) and the findings of a survey of 41 students of the Buketov Karaganda National Research University provide an empirical base. A mixed-method design and non-parametric statistical approaches (Fisher criteria, Mann-Whitney, Spearman correlation) were used to compare the respondents’ psychological attitudes with their real translation decisions. The results revealed a striking paradox: in the overwhelming majority of situations, even when students recognize the ideological slant of the original, they turn to semantic calquing. The adoption of this strategy is based on a mistaken view of professional ethics and the paradigm of “fidelity to the original." And this leads to the pragmatic reduction and voluntary self-exoticization of national cultural heritage for the Western reader in the outgoing vector. It is argued that to overcome the automatism of epistemic submissiveness, it is required to implement techniques of intentional deconstruction and to change students from passive transmitters of foreign hierarchies into active subjects of intercultural communication.