МЕСТО ОТРАСЛЕВОЙ ДОКУМЕНТАЦИИ В КЛАССИФИКАЦИИ ТЕКСТОВ, ОРИЕНТИРОВАННОЙ НА ПЕРЕВОД (НА ПРИМЕРЕ ЖЕЛЕЗНОДОРОЖНОЙ ДОКУМЕНТАЦИИ)

Creation of multilingual subject ontologies is one of the perspective interdisciplinary research areas. The first stage of this process requires significant time expenditures a project team must spend to handle natural language texts (manually or automatically). To create subject ontologies in the field of railway transport, texts of different genres (in particular, documents) should be included in such a text collection [1].

It is well known that documents as written texts play a leading role in organization of business communication within enterprises of different industries. Our literature review has shown that there is no an only true and accepted definition of documentation. Some signs of interest show two definitions suggested by L. I. Skvortsov and I. S. Alekseeva [2; 3].  Indeed, all documents demonstrate typical text principles and could be translated from one language into another with the help of similar translation techniques. At the same time, the results of literature review show that specific features of railway documentation translation process warrant further study. Let us consider in depth the definition of industry-specific (ex. railway) documentation.

Besides functional document systems which are in general common for all the entities, industry document systems for documentation of specific business and non-business activities by industry enterprises are distinguished.  These are, for example, healthcare service documents, notarial documents, juridical documents, etc. Organizational-administrative documentation is closely related both to industrial-specific and functional systems.  On the one hand it provides the legal basis for other systems; on the other hand it reflects management, control, planning, reporting and other issues [4].

In terms of railway industry, its document system typically includes the following: standards, regulations, Codes of Business Conduct, orders, instructions, acts, methodological instructive regulations, transport strategies, transportation rules, etc. All the above-stated railway documents are industry-specific technical texts which language and format must meet a particular template [5; 6].

According to the translation-oriented classification of texts, industry-specific documents in general and railway documents in particular could be classified as instructions [3]. Their linguo-communicative specificity could be described as follows:

I. Source Type (Author): group-wide (administration, ministry or agency which creates a document following the strict rules of genre).

II. Receiver Type (Addressee): group-wide with sufficient proficiency level (industry employees).

III. Dominant Information: operating information (i.e. call for actions and regulation of actions); cognitive information plays an important role.

IV. Information Contents (Levels of Equivalence and Density):

a. Syntax Level: imperative, nominative sentences, cumbersome expressions, officialese and juridical clichés, etc.

b. Semantic Level: technical terms, juridical words and phrases, complex nouns, absence of adjectives expressing emotions, acronyms, etc.

c. Pragmatic Level: culture-specific proper names and acronyms: names of advanced technologies, standards and acts which require comments of a translator.

d. Density: non uniform – technical descriptions may include drawings, schemes, terminological acronyms, etc.; considered the whole text, it has only common acronyms (etc., i.e.). 

V. Communicative Function: reporting information and giving instructions.

As we can see form the list, industry-specific texts do present language typical for instructions. However, we may find some distinguishing features.

The results of analysis let us identify a number of difficulties of translation of railway documents from English into Russian which a translator may face during a translation process: 1) distinction in sentence complexity; 2) predominance of Passive in the English source which must be transformed into Active in the Russian target text; 3) juridical clichés and phrases; 4) terminological complex nouns; 5) railway terms; 6) culture-specific proper names and acronyms, etc.

Conclusion:

1. The place of industry-specific (railway) documents in the translation-oriented classification of texts is identified.

2. While industry-specific (railway) documents have typical features of instructions, they demonstrate their own linguistic features determined by the type of a Receiver (group-wide with sufficient proficiency level).

3.  Imperative, nominative sentences, cumbersome expressions, juridical clichés, etc. are typical for industry-specific (railway) documents.

4. Distinction in sentence complexity, juridical clichés and phrases, terminological complex nouns, railway terms and culture-specific proper names and acronyms could present translation problems.