Understanding translation universals

Translation S- and T-universals have been widely discussed in Translation Studies and their psycholinguistic study has been among the priority topics today. The article is focused on the study of translation ‘S- universals’ (Chesterman 2004) and is based both on the psycholinguistic model of literary translation, which combines today’s neuroscience theories of cognitivism and connectionism, and on the experimental data that demonstrate its validity. The model is resulted in a series of experiments held with undergraduate students of translation department. The results of the study proved the idea of existing specific procedural and discursive S-universals in literary translation. As the empirical data showed, these universals maintain the status of common strategies depending on translator’s cognitive style (analytical or synthetic) and his dominant channel (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) of source text perception.