Individual and Psychological Peculiarities of Translating as a Language Abilities Component

The article addresses the differential-psychological aspect of translating abilities as a component of language abilities. The peculiarity of translation is described including both linguistic and paralinguistic aspects of translating a content and a sense from one language into another accompanied by linguistic and cognitive actions. A variety of individual and psychological peculiarities of translation based on the translation dominant were revealed. It was demonstrated that these peculiarities are relevant to communicative and linguistic types of language abilities discovered byM.K. Kabardov. Valid assessment methods such as M.N. Borisova’s test for investigation “artistic” and “thinking” types of Higher Nervous Activity (HNA), D. Wechsler’ test of verbal and nonverbal intelligence, and a test developed by the authors of the article for individual specificity of interpreter’s activity as communicative and linguistic types of translating abilities assessment were used. The results suggest that all the typological differences are based on special human types of HNA. Subjects displaying the “thinking” type use linguistic methods when translating, whereas subjects displaying the “artistic” type try to use their own subjective life experience and extralinguistic methods when translating foreign language constructions. Extreme subjects of both types try to use the most developed components of their special abilities in order to compensate the components of the other type which are not well developed to accomplish some language tasks. In this case subjects of both types can fulfill these tasks rather successfully.