Psycholinguistic Aspects of Translating LIWC Dictionary

Abstract. Recent developments in computerized linguistic and psychological research tools have heightened the need for broadening not only their areas of use, but also their applied languages. Therefore, there is an urgent need to address the translation problems caused by different target culture-bound issues. Existing research in the domain of translation studies recognises the critical role played by translating transformations as psycholinguistic logical operations performed in the translator’s mind. This paper explores the ways in which selected original Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) 2015 (Pennebaker et al., 2015) dictionary items can be reproduced in Ukrainian with due account of their semantic, pragmatic, and cultural load. The most obvious finding to emerge from this study is that the translator should apply a set of lexical translation transformations including differerentiation, concretization, generalization of word meaning along with transсoding, explication, and calquing. Some linguistic items, e.g. from the category of ‘Leisure’, ‘Netspeak’ were not translated at all, i.e. retained their original form, due to their shared use today both by speakers of English and Ukrainian. Further research should be undertaken to investigate methods of reproducing LIWC vocabulary in other languages.