4 Tryokhsviatitelska St., 01001, Kyiv, Ukraine
Phone: (044) 278 8971; phone/fax:
(044) 279 2292; 278 7573;
e-mail: kiti@cyfra.net
The Center is an educational and at the same time research institution working for the whole Academy, its headquartes being located in Kyiv and its branches spread over regional science centers in Lviv, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk and Sevastopol.
The tasks of the Center as a higher educational facility of the graduate-education level cover, first and foremost, training of NAS post-graduate students and research associates in foreign languages. The Center possesses unique materials and means for upgrading the linguistic competence of adult professionals of the highest level. It organizes admittance examinations in foreign languages for post-graduate course candidates, the advanced-level training under differentiated programs, as well as provides candidate-of-science-degree exams in foreign (mainly West-European) languages and in Russian and Ukrainian as second languages.
Research activities of the Center are focused on typological, contrastive and translatological study of the languages of the European-and-American linguistic area. Here a special role is played by studies of the academic school founded and headed by NAS corresponding member V. V. Akulenko, who formulated the general theory of interlinguistic equivalents in languages, starting with the comparisons of the leading world languages and specializing this theory for the data of major European languages. A new step was made by the application of this concept to closely related Slavic languages and its further refinement.
The other area of the research done at the Center is the functional-and-semantic description of European languages at the levels of linguistic systems, speech norms and speech activities (texts, discourses), in particular, in the comparative and characterological aspects. These studies have already been employed in lexicographical practice, terminological work, translatology, in producing state-of-the-art teaching materials and are waiting for further broad application in those and other fields. Today the Center's research department is compiling unique differential novel dictionaries on this basis.
The Center maintains a post-graduate course.
The Center is the major co-founder of the specialized educational instituion - Kyiv Institute of Translators and Interpreters, which provides up-to-date higher education with the major in translation and interpretation. It also allows specialists having a degree in various subjects to obtain a second degree in the abovementioned field. Due to its stable and high rating among employers and specialists, the Institute enjoys a good reputation both in Kyiv and in Ukraine as a whole.
The Center is open for cooperation with both home and foreign institutions involved in social and applied linguistics, translatology and language teaching.