FORMING THE TRANSLATION COMPETENCE OF PHILOLOGY STUDENTS IN THE PROCESS OF TEACHING GERMAN TRANSLATION (BASED ON THE WORKS OF THEODOR FONTANE)

Abstract

The article addresses the problem of forming the translation competence of philology students in the process of teaching German translation, drawing on the prose of Theodor Fontane, the most prominent representative of German poetic realism of the second half of the nineteenth century. The relevance of the study follows, on the one hand, from the persistent demand of higher philological education for didactically grounded models of forming professional translator competence, and, on the other, from the appearance of the first complete Ukrainian translation of the novel Effi Briest (translated by Roksolana Sviato, published by Tempora in 2026), which for the first time opens up a practical possibility for comparative translation instruction based on a canonical text that had previously remained outside the scope of Ukrainian publishing. The purpose of the article is to develop and theoretically substantiate a methodological model for forming the translation competence of philology students on the basis of Fontane’s prose and to define a system of exercises corresponding to the structure of professional translator competence as it is interpreted in contemporary Ukrainian translation-teaching methodology. The study employs methods of analysis and systematisation of scholarly and methodological literature, a contextual-interpretive method for identifying translation-relevant features of Fontane’s language, and modelling of an exercise system. It is established that Fontane’s prose – free indirect discourse (erlebte Rede), restrained authorial irony, socially marked vocabulary of Prussian provincial life, dialectal elements in the speech of minor characters, and characters’ letters as embedded genre forms – constitutes valuable, didactically layered material for the consistent formation of the receptive-analytical, reproductive, and editorialreflective components of translation competence. A three-stage methodological model of working with the text is proposed: pre-translation analysis, controlled translation of a fragment with subsequent comparison against the published professional translation, and editing with reflection. It is shown that the selected material organically extends the already existing practice of using the novel Effi Briest as a source of lexical and communicative tasks at the B1 level in teaching German as a foreign language, allowing language training to be combined with initial literary-translation skills. The findings may be applied in developing syllabi for translation-cycle courses for philology students studying German.