Metacultural Competence Within Ethnolinguistics and Translation: Students’ Viewpoint

Recent decade has witnessed the shift to competence-based approach in philologist training; and, thus, opened new vistas for scholars in the issue of framing metacultural (ethnolinguistic) competence within the scope of interethnic communication and translation. To some extent, the issue discussed becomes topical from the viewpoint of modern technological abilities. Though helpful, readymade translation suggestions -with the use of automated translation systems -deprive the learner of basic necessity to developing ethnic and cultural competences for bilingual learners and translator training along with other competences, such as linguistic and textual, research, technical, information, thematic, and translation competences. The aim of the article is to view the role of metacultural (ethnolinguistic) competence in translation and translator training, to trace and specify features of coexistence of related research priorities (culturological, anthropological, ethnolinguistic) within the practice of translation and to characterize achievements of ethnolinguistics as a multidisciplinary discipline, which, we claim, encompasses metacultural (ethnolinguistic) competence. From the theoretical viewpoint, the study shares the assumption that metacultural (ethnolinguistic) competence counterparts consist of cultural schema, cultural category, cultural metaphor. In the light of didactics, the purpose was to investigate if students perceived the language as an important element of the culture of a given community (here, English and Ukrainian). In its essence, the procedure proposed has been primarily targeted at studying if students clearly understand that a language does not only consist of grammatical rules that govern the words but, first and foremost, it is the way of receiving and describing the reality, often different within divergent cultures. To test the hypotheses a special questionnaire was designed. Experiment participants: 125 second year students of the Bachelor's Degree Program of the Department of Applied Linguistics at Lviv Polytechnic National University. Findings have proven that ethnolinguistic competence helps students to identify lexical connotations established in the transitive sense of a word; recognize ethno specific elements of a given language; and suggest a wellconsidered translator's choice. The results of this study can be used by the trainors (teachers) of translation with the intention to revise their approaches to teaching translation competences especially in the field of literary texts processing.