The article is an attempt to explore cognitive mechanisms, which determine the choice of terminological correspondences. The object of research is contextual correspondences to mineralogical terms in the Russian translation dating back to 1778. This historic period witnessed the rise of minerology in Russia, which was the reason why many foreign terms had no equivalents yet in the Russian language. This allows tracing the mental process of creating new terms for the unfamiliar notions. The cognitive perspective reveals itself in the type of a semantic link between the source text term and the target text term. The authors conclude that loan translation, borrowings, analogues and lexical transformations in the 18th century Russian translation are deeply rooted in the imitation, analogy and metonymic shift as mental operations for acquiring knowledge and forming terminology in the field of science.
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