Developing pre-translation text analysis skills of students of Economics

Teaching written translation has existedfor a thousand years. In spite of this fact the methodology of teaching translation is still developing. Teaching translation by translating isthe longest and less effective way to get the necessary skills. The approach, which deals with translation mainly as a search for lexical andgrammatical equivalents in two languages, may explain why learners are often unable to understand and reproduce the discourse as awhole despite the abundance of grammatical and lexical equivalents they have accumulated. The meaning of a sentence or a text is notcomposed of the sum of the meanings of individual lexical items. The article describes the model of teaching pre-translation text analysisof professional texts. The characteristics of this analysis and its components are given. The elements of pre-translation text analysis laythe basis for distinguishing elements of teaching this activity. In the issue of research in this field we defined the following objects oftext analysis: components of communicative, compositional and pragmatic text structures. The model of teaching consists of threestages: I. First stage is connected with understanding objective facts, main topic and its formal markers. Compositional scheme of thetext is defined. During this stage the following skills are developed: to divide text into semantic parts, to define main thought, which isexpressed verbally. The aims of the first stage are: 1. Divide text into semantic parts. 2. Define main topic. 3. Define speech forms. II.During the second stage the communicative text structure is under study. Theme-rheme progression and text cohesion are analysed. Theaims of this stage accounts for the required skills: to define theme-rheme progression and cohesion devices. III. The third stage isdevoted to the pragmatic structure of the text. The aims of the third stage are as follows: 1. Define the idea of the text. 2. Define thecommunicative intention and effect. 3. Define the characteristics of the speech situation. 4. Define the text genre. The exercises complexincludes three series, each devoted to development of one skill. The first series is aimed at defining the most essential information in theparagraph and the whole text. Exercises of this series develop the abilities to define the main topic and speech forms, to divide text intosemantic parts. Exercises of the second series are aimed at defining components of the communicative text structure. The third series ofexercises combine analytical, synthesizing and generalizing tasks. They allow defining the pragmatic structure of the text, the stylisticcharacteristics of its genre and developing the corresponding text analysis skills. Exercises have an 'open' character in terms of theirability to change type due to the change of task formulation and type of methodological support. It gives an opportunity to follow allstages of skills formation and development. The represented model of teaching was experimentally tested while teaching English forSpecific Purposes to students of Economics in Tomsk Polytechnic University.

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