This article discusses the concept of cognitive familiarity and the irnportance of
schemata (schematic knowledge) in the acquisition of translation and
interpretation skills. It reports un experiment carried out regularly in the author's
Russian-Italian interpreting classes as part of a number of exercises which are
preparatory to interpreting training. Students are given two weeks for activating
their schematic-encyclopaedic knowledge of media language and, more
specifically, of the rhetorical routine represented by the titles of regular columns
of Italian papers. Students are then asked to translate as many as two hundred
column titles from Russian papers and magazines. Through lexical
brainstorming, students are subsequently encouraged to verbalise all possible
associations. After completing this task, their attention is drawn to some
morphosyntactic diffrences between the two languages in terms of the
categories of determination, nominalisation, adjective groups, potential source of
interference, etc. The cultural (both explicit and implicit), linguistic and textual
elements which characterise this type of text, help students proceduralise
strategic solutions to translation problems. The interest-arousing and attention catching
functions of this text typology should stimulate students to activate
frames of reference and rhetorical routines which enable them to find appropriate
solutions and transfer strategies in a concentrated way, thereby developing
creativity and idiomaticity. This exercise may be useful not only to check their
internalisation of translation strategies (singlular/plural shifts, recourse to
analytical constructions, lexical by-pass strategies or compensation procedures to
transfer Russian prepositional and adverbial phrases), but also to make students
aware of the importance of cultural adaptation in translation. The pedagogical
aim of this task is to combine the development of students' procedural
knowledge (know-how and know-when) with thut of declarative knowledge
(know-why). In performing these exercises, students will not confine themselves
to semantic-lexical transformations of the SLT but will be forced to mindshift
between two cultures and get into the habit of changing cultural frames, thus
drawing upon their schematic-encyclopaedic knowledge.
