Variable interpretation of reality in a literary fairy tale: an integrated

The purpose of the article is to implement a comprehensive approach to the analysis of mechanisms and techniques of variable interpretation of reality in Hovhannes Tumanyan's fairy tale “The Master and the Worker” and its variants (namely its translations into Russian and into the language of cinema). The tasks are to analyze the mechanisms of interpretation from the semiotic, taxonomic, cognitive, translation, and extralinguistic perspectives. Well-developed methodologies of the cognitive theory of variable interpretation of reality and translation studies indicate the relevance of the conducted research. The research methods included comparison and introspection; the empirical material was collected by continuous sampling. The authors developed an integrated approach to the analysis of the mechanisms of the alternative interpretation of reality. The paper also reviews the theory of variable interpretation, emphasizing the importance of studying this theory in the context of translatological comparisons of literary text variants. From the semiotic perspective, it is determined that at the “character-character” level these mechanisms perform a plot-forming function in a fairy tale. From the translatological perspective, the mechanisms are investigated as those implementing the translator's strategies. Taxonomically, the paper characterizes the lexical level of the existence of alternative interpretation mechanisms, while cognitively it reveals such perception bias as the focusing effect. Special attention is paid to the extralinguistic aspect of determining the features of post-revolutionary translations. The novelty of the research is in the implementation of the extralinguistic aspect and the newly interpreted cognitive aspect. The development of an integrated approach to studying the mechanisms of alternative interpretation of reality will be useful for the research on significant literary texts with various translations and film adaptations.