A Psycholinguistic Analysis of the First Ukrainian Syllabi on General and Special Methodology of Translation by Mykhailo Kalynovych and Mykola Zerov

Abstract

The article studies and discusses the programs of interrelated lecture courses on General and Special Methodology of Translation, developed for the Ukrainian Institute of Linguistic Education by its professors Mykhailo Kalynovych and Mykola Zerov in September 1932. This material is analyzed from the perspective of psycholinguistic text theory, according to which the text is the basic unit of discourse that, in turn, is a component of communicative action, along with the situation. The study focuses on the micro- and macrotext structure of the above programs and highlights the peculiarities of their communicative intentions in the political and social reality of early Stalinism. It features the unique, innovative elements in them, but also those that were typical of the early Soviet theory of translation. For the first time not only in Ukrainian but also in the All-Union thought on translation, Kalynovych and Zerov presented in their integrated courses the ramified structure of Translation Studies as a multifaceted discipline. They introduced into the discipline novel methodology and new research directions, particularly by creating such areas as the history of translation studies and translation management. The material of Zerov's syllabus on Special Methodology of Translation is first published and discussed in this article. The typewritten text of the syllabus remained unknown until the author of the article found and identified it in the Archives of the Literary Museum of Hryhoriy Kochur, who had been a student of Zerov at the Kyiv Institute of Public Education and further remained his faithful follower. During the Khrushchev thaw, Kochur made many efforts to rehabilitate the name of Zerov – a distinguished literary scholar, lecturer, and poet-translator. The syllabus on General Methodology of Translation outlined by professor Kalynovych was found earlier in the same Archives and published in 2015. However, this article pioneers its presentation and analysis in mutual complementarity with the syllabus by Zerov.