Communicative Equivalence in Translation: Language, Cultural, and Cognitive Presuppositions

Mediated communication where two or more languages and cultures interact inevitably tends to raise complex issues, one of which - communicative equivalence and adequate conveyance of peculiarities of social and cultural experiencies within processes of discourse comprehension and production - has given rise to significant developments and debates in translation theory in recent years. Investigation of pragmatic aspects of sense interaction in the course of cognitive structuring and linguistic presenting of knowledge and human experience in the context of bilingual communication represents an important tendency that contributes to the forming of the predominant cognitive approach that is steadily gaining acceptance in linguistic science. In the field of modern mass media discourse that has acquired special relevance for scientific research impediments and encumbrances in achieving efficacy within verbalization processes of cognitive information on the basis of dynamic interaction of corresponding conceptual systems of the sender and the addressee have been increasingly faced by participants of cross-cultural communication. This study focuses on linguistic, cognitive, and cultural factors that come into play in mediated communication viewed through the prism of communicative equivalence. The aim of this article is to undertake a comparative analysis of mass media discourse lexical units in the Russian, the Spanish, and the English languages and to point out some relevant similarities and differences among the functional and semiotic potential of the latter. The methods of semantic and comparative analysis, along with the method of translation and the questionary method are employed in this research. Ph.D. students of People’s Friendship University of Russia (RUDN-UNIVERSITY) from Russia, Albania, Algeria, Colombia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Netherland, Yemen, Ukraine, etc. (119) learning Spanish as a second foreign language are involved in the study. We conclude that in the cognitive space of media discourse the object itself and the lexical units denominating the latter in the Russian, the Spanish, and the English languages mostly coincide as for their functional and semantic potentials, ensuring possibilities for the reconstruction or restoration of communication presuppositions and the establishing of associative links with the referential situation as the appeal to corresponding image on the level of specificities concerning the modelling of cognitive space in linguistic consciousness of their carriers, which forms the grounds for both an adequate actualization of relevant communicative features and their pragmatic markedness in mass media discourse, what consequently becomes relevant to the communicative equivalence in translation as well. The practical value of the article encompasses its relevance to linguistic researches in the field of discourse analysis, as well as cognitive and functional linguistics.