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This paper explores the interface between the conscious and unconscious minds in translation and focuses on the inner word form that it considers to be the linchpin in this interface. This paper assumes that words pertain via their inner forms directly to archetypal images and via these images indirectly to archetypes, which underpins image-driven interpretations of individual words in translation. This paper discusses Ukrainian гріх commonly translated as English a sin and shows that this translatability does not imply an interpretability as the words via their inner forms relate to two distinct archetypal images - of fire and of movement, respectively, - that uniquely transcend the cultures to the core and capture a different, culture-specific knowledge of SIN. Pictorially, these are different SINs, owing to which гріх means something different to a speaker of Ukrainian than a sin does to a speaker of English. Yet, ingredients and associations drawn into the archetypal images show that THE SHADOW, ANIMA, THE SELF, and TRANSFORMATIONS are the archetypes that jointly endow to speakers the same foreknowledge of SIN as mediated from within the collective unconscious. This way the inner word forms via their connection to archetypal images extend back beyond the conscious into the unconscious mind.

In this paper, we develop a theory of image-driven interpretations for the translation studies domain. Interpretations make the core of translation and are explained in terms of mental images. An image-driven interpretation gives a meaning to a source-language word and finds in the target language the word to capture this meaning, which is a creative act and a cross-cultural transfer. An interpretation is ‘drawing’ images in the human mind by the powers of the mind’s representational content. Our theory proposes a role for etymological insight in boosting translation students’ interpretive skills via exposed inner word forms. These archaic archetypal images contain culture-specific information transmitted through human generations with the help of language. Inner word forms are non-trivial triggers in cultural exposure that raise students’ awareness of the native and foreign cultures and add an in-depth dimension to regular vocabulary work and other good practices in the translation classroom. We pin down some of the influences that native Ukrainian words and borrowings have had on the Ukrainians’ interpretive mind.

This paper focuses on the theoretical concept of subjectivity in the translation of metaphors of depressive emotions in W. Styron’s Darkness visible: A memoir of madness into Russian. In his memoir, the author interprets his emotions and names them via metaphors; these interpretations are driven by images in the author’s mind. An image-driven interpretation in translation is a creative act of ascribing a meaning to a word in the source language and of finding a word to capture this meaning in the target language. This act is driven by images ‘drawn’ in the translator’s mind. Mental images as non-propositional objects in the mind are verbalized by words of languages based on propositional structures. This entails semantic losses to translation, minimized by finding words in the target language that make optimal descriptions for the author’s mental images. This paper suggests a hypothesis that metaphor translation is based on their interpretations driven by the translator’s mental images. The theoretical framework of study treats metaphor translation in terms of optimality rather than accuracy of translation. The article uses the subjectivity argument to show that mental images are the translator’s but not the author’s. Subjectivity locks the translator into their own experiences and consequently makes impossible a full compliance of translator’s and the author’s shared phenomenal consciousness. An empirical analysis of metaphorical creativity based on E. Menikov's translation of W. Styron's metaphors of depressive emotions shows that Russian translation often lacks the images that the author uses as the basis for English creative metaphors: on the one hand, the translator's interpretation is conditioned by images that differ from the author's, on the other, some of the author's images are missing from the translation. According to the embodied mind theory, in translation of metaphorical concepts, the degree of creativity is the smallest for conveying universal metaphors and the highest for conveying their contextual variants. The obtained results and conclusions will contribute to the understanding of creativity in the translation of unconventional metaphors.