Cognitive basis of making creative decisions in translation activities

The purpose of the paper is tomodel the cognitivemechanism ofgeneratingcreative elementsin translation activities that are increasingly relevant in the context of modern requirements for the translator’s work. The authors systematize, refine and supplement the available theoretical knowledge about translation creativity. The authors describe the available results of searching for creativity in target texts. The paper provides a cognitive mechanism scheme that launches creative ideas in translation activities. It works byconstructing a cognitive focus - a sort ofconscious reasonable integration of cognitive orientations, translation strategies and mental operations, actualizing weak associative links between mental representations available in the information field of the translation subject, in most cases leads to making creative translation decisions that require high efforts. The results of the study showed that translation creativity goes beyond the limits of linguistic creativity, and is realized both with the help of linguistic (ready-made speech word forms or newword-formations), and paralinguistic (color gamut, etc.). The examples considered in thearticle show that modulation and “thinking transcription” are the most productive mental operations of generating creative translation decisions. Strategies for domestication and transcreation also contribute most to the development of translation creativity.