Articles

The article is a review of the textbook written by Natalia V. Kabyak for students studying Russian as a foreign language. It is based on the material of Soviet films from different chronological periods and encompasses vast strata of vocabulary, including colloquialisms, in terms of comprehension and translation. Cinema materials consist mainly of comedies which are attractive and easy for reception. Th e textbook disposes important cognitive potential which serves a purpose of students’ communicative competence progress and adaptation in the Russian linguistic and cultural environment.

The article is dedicated to the didactic principles necessary for the formation of an interpreter’s personal competence. The study and improvement of interpreting didactics is still relevant due to the expansion of international contacts and the growing need for specialists who have not only a wide and deep knowledge of both foreign and native languages, but also a certain set of personal qualities that contribute to the implementation of successful professional activity. One of the components of personal competence is a high working memory capacity. It is thanks to the working memory that interpreters are able to convey information in another language in the most complete and accurate way, so it is important for students to train their memory at the initial stages of professional training. This article offers some tasks aimed at developing memory among future interpreters.

The paper is focused on the issue of lexical-phraseological composition of modern public political speeches, which has been significantly changed over the past few decades as a result of such linguistic and extra-linguistic factors as the rise of verbal aggression in non-cooperative speech acts due to language democratization; the emergence of new trends in economic, socio-political and cultural areas of society; the removal and destruction of speech taboos between the 20th and 21st centuries. These factors have shift ed from the peripheral part of political discourse to its center such lexical units which previously were practically never found in institutional types of discourse and were exclusively the prerogative of personality-oriented discourse. A massive use of stylistically marked and culturally determined lexical units, along with various neologisms, has prompted a need to find solutions to overcome lexical-grammatical and stylistic difficulties in public political translation. Public speeches of the Russian President Vladimir Putin over the period from 2015 to 2022 served as the source of the analysis, because they have a marked interstyle nature.

Discourse affects the semantics of lexical units. Discursively dependent semantics presents a challenge for intercultural communication. This study proposes a method for identifying the discursively dependent semantics of lexical units through an analysis of the discourse on the conflict in Syria, presented in the Russian and French press. The proposed methodology is based on the analysis of the structure of lexical-semantic fields (LSF) of lexical units included in the discourse, and allows us to achieve technological efficiency in the analysis and formalize the results. 

As a result of the comparative analysis of the cooccurrence of lexical units within the French- and Russian-language discourses, it was found that the lexical units forming the classes of conditional equivalence have significant differences at the level of the structure of lexical-semantic fields due to the peculiarities of media coverage of the Syrian conflict in Russia and France. The difference at the level of LSF of the same-named units significantly affects the semantics of lexical units and, thus, modifies its pragmatic effect. These data should be taken into account when translating.

Based on the “Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and China” in 2019, the article is devoted to the problem of lexical features of the official business style of the Russian language and Chinese. The article reveals the definition of official business style according to the opinions of Russian and Chinese scientists, analyzes the main lexical features, compares the similarities and differences of lexical features between Russian and Chinese.

The article analyzed translations of the public signs installed on the territory of China and are aimed at native speakers of the Russian language. It is important to note that when translating from Chinese into Russian, while taking into consideration to the differences in the system of languages, the norms of the contemporary Russian literary language, including syntactic norms, are violated. In this paper, the authors propose a classification of the types of violations of the linguistic norms of the present-day Russian literary language based on the texts of public signs in Russian. The reasons for the occurrence of these violations are presented and a recommended translation option is proposed. Errors in the translation of public signs are described from the point of view of syntactic structures, e. g. various types of phrases and sentences. At the same time, along with the violation of syntactic norms in the translation of public signs into Russian, violations of lexical norms are considered. More precise equivalents for both languages are proposed, taking into account cross-cultural communication aspects. The set public signs translated into Russian can serve as a starting point for further research into graphic, spelling, lexical, grammatical and even pragmatic errors.

In the novel “A Dream of Red Mansions” the author Cao Xueqin connects the characters’ nicknames with the characters themselves and the themes of the work, forming the epithet metaphor. The translation of these metaphors has a far-reaching significance for cross-cultural communication. Thus, the object of our research includes the personal names and nicknames of the novel’s characters, with a special focus on their translation into Russian. The aim of the paper is to confirm or question the adequacy of the translation technique adopted by the translator in each particular case. Based on the conceptual metaphor theory, this paper sorts out some epithets in the 1958 Russian translation of “A Dream of Red Mansions,” explores the formation mechanism of epithet metaphor in the combination of literary and cultural contexts, and puts forward corresponding translation strategies for different interpretations of metaphor in different cultural contexts. The originality of research consists, first, in examining both personal names and nicknames and, second, in evaluating each technique employed by the translator in the light of both the linguocultural and text-centered approaches.

The research is focused on the aspect of functional speech adaptation of language interpreters who are gaining practical experience at the initial stage in the sphere of foreign-language military-professional communication and paying special attention to the search for original speech strategies to achieve the targets of the translation process in the most efficient way. The critical objective of the article is to theorize the functional speech adaptation and underscore the need and importance to develop interpreters’ unique creative strategies in the process of their adaptive profession al maturation for the due carrying out of normal and special translation tasks under the conditions of operational military activities abroad. A detailed review of the scientific sources is carried out concerning research into definitions of linguistic terms such as: “adaptation,” “speech adaptation,” “speech strategies.” The author’s definition of the core of the term “Functional speech adaptation” is given and its main differences are outlined versus the definitions of the linguistic categories “adaptation” and “pragmatic adaptation” proposed by Russian linguistic theorists earlier. The most effective strategies for interpreting are reviewed, viz.: implementation of an interpreter’s anticipation, a strategy for target text forming from the ground of precision information, and a strategy for source text segmentation into minimal translation cells. The study applies the methods of definitional analysis, comparative analysis of theoretical principles with their generalization, theoretical synthesis of the concepts’ definitions, linguistic description method and linguistic modeling. The results of the conducted research make a significant contribution to studying functional speech adaptation of military interpreters in the implementation of interpreting and translation tasks on the foreign military sub-languages material. Moreover, the results of the study can be used for future research purposes of translation studies, theoretical and applied linguistics.

Seventy years aft er the first publication of the Russian author Andrei V. Fedorov’s book Introduction to Translation Theory, specifically focused on translation studies, the present article makes an attempt to highlight once again Mr Fedorov’s contribution to laying the foundations for a universal translation theory and to observe, in retrospect, the peripeteia of its naming, the identification of its research field, its subject-matter and issues against the backdrop of various social, ideological and research contexts. Special emphasis is put on the functional concept of translation; the connection between linguistic stylistics and the theory of translation is retraced; an interpretation of different mid-twentieth-century scholars’ outlooks on the correlation between language and thinking, as well as the main categories of translation studies, is proposed

This article is a comparative analysis of the concept “Memory” in English and Russian linguistic culture. It studies the English and Russian phraseological means that verbalize the abovementioned concept. The purpose of the article is to consider phraseological units expressing the concept “Memory” in both languages. The relevance of the work is due to an increased interest in phraseological linguistic units, since they capture the archetypes of human consciousness. To achieve the object in view, the definitional analysis method and the descriptive method have been used. The phraseological units reflect the idea of the British and Russian nations about the concept of memory. The author emphasizes the fact that phraseological units have cultural differences in each language. It is assumed that this research will allow us to understand the culture and mentality of the English and Russian ethnic groups.

The article discusses the features of the Russian Chinese pidgin against the background of Russian-Chinese intercultural communication from different points of view in terms of the formation and development of regional cultural linguistics. A diachronic study of bilingual advertising communication based on signboards is carried out from the sociolinguistic and linguistic perspectives. The object of the study is the lexicon of two types of pidgin from Chinese-Russian pidgin dictionaries and the Harbin dialect dictionarу as long as Chinese-Russian bilingual signs in the city of Harbin from 1902 to the present day. The change of the dominant language and translation strategy in bilingual advertising communication is analyzed.

As part of the proper names system, toponyms represent a particular layer of every language that hardens the choice of strategy to translate them into foreign languages. An analysis of the ways of translating Russian toponyms into Chinese has revealed that Chinese translation rules are structured and adaptive to the semantic characteristics of individual components of toponyms. In contrast, the Russian translation practice still needs more unity in translating Chinese toponyms. Based on the results of the comparison and summary of the Chinese experience of translating Russian toponyms into Chinese, the current paper presents rules for applying semantic loaning to the translation of Chinese toponyms with regard to the cultural and semantic characteristics of individual components of toponyms. These rules contribute to structuring the translation of Chinese toponyms into Russian and uncover their semantic, geographical, natural, and cultural characteristics, thus providing speakers of the target language with the same amount of information about a place accessible to the source language speakers.

Translation quality evaluation is generally referred to as one the mechanisms for translation industry development and the most important tool in the field of translator training, which determines the relevance of the stated topic. The purpose of this study is to review the problems and approaches to translation quality evaluation highlighting the differences in their treatment. The paper focuses on the study of the cognitive-terminological and system-activity aspects of translation evaluation, with special emphasis on the borderline between the process of quality evaluation and its result. An analysis of the term translation quality as used in meta-translation discourse demonstrated signifi cant diff erences in the conceptualization of this notion. In translation theory, the term is generally used as an evaluative indicator of translation results, although in a broader sense it also refers to one of the main categories of translation studies that requires systematic research and description. In meta-translation discourse, translation quality may refer to a fairly high level of translation per se, but in combination with additional descriptive characteristics the term can also indicate diff erent levels of quality, down to the lowest. To assess the results of translation using classical evaluative terms, namely equivalence and adequacy, it is generally necessary to clarify their conceptual content, which corresponds to a particular scientifi c paradigm. The existence of diff erent and/or opposing points of view on the theory and practice of translation quality evaluation is accounted for by the complex and multidimensional nature of the phenomenon under consideration. The novelty of the conducted research lies in the distinction between translation evaluation as a result and translation evaluation as a process considered as a type of intellectual activity. Finally, we developed a model which reflects the structure of evaluation activities in the fi eld of translation. The main components of this model are: the evaluation sphere, the evaluation actor, the object under evaluation (i.e. translation results), the purpose of evaluation activity, the evaluation method, the criteria and the parameters of evaluation. Following the system-activity approach one can take into account various facets of the problem of translation quality evaluation as well as the complex of motives and individual independent steps that determine the end result.

Precedent statements are an important intertextual phenomenon that makes it possible to include the work in the body of already existing texts but to actualize the game with the readers’ expectations. A quotation has the potential to perform many functions: it can serve as a direct reference to the author or a specific work, it can imply a broad cultural outlook of the reader, it can form the internal context of the work, as if these quotations were taken from texts invented by the characters themselves, etc. The aim of the article is to analyze the precedent statements in the novel of R. Zelazny “Creatures of Light and Darkness”. The extensive use of different types and levels of precedent phenomena characterizes this fiction novel as a whole. Three Russian translations of R. Zelazny’s novel were used as illustrative material. The method of research is contrastive semantic-syntactic analysis. A number of quotations in the novel by R. Zelazny’s novel initially assumes some “understatement”, when the reader either has to have a broad outlook in order to recognize the reference to the precedent text, or must try to guess what it is about. It is especially interesting when the source of the quotation is unknown and unrecognizable, so there is an interpretive lacuna that serves as a challenge to the reader. Translators look for ways to convey and simultaneously compensate for this reticence by various means, including, in some cases, eliminating the reticence itself (e. g. by introducing a reference to pretexts, although this does not exist in the original work). The results allow us to identify the translation that is closest to the original in pragmatic terms, as well as to conclude that there is some continuity in the translations: while the earlier translations are significantly different, the later translation uses some of its predecessors’ solutions.

This article analyzes the formation of the diversity of the genre of the series of novels “The Dark Tower” by Stephen King, as well as the clips of Robert Browning’s poem in the predominant image of the Tower of Roland and the connection with these genre transformations. In the course of the study, the authors analyze the series of novels “The Dark Tower” and the poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”, in particular, the features of the genres, the compositional and stylistic features inherent in these works. When demonstrating the characteristic features of R. Browning’s and S. King’s creative work, it was found that romanticized fantasy per se includes many genre features that differ from the manifestations of horror and classic fiction: fantasy is a genre in the style of high fantasy and concealment, a fairy tale. At the same time, dark fantasy, although it includes most of the traditional fantasy surroundings, is characterized not so much by the interrelationship between its fantasy elements and the narrative, but rather by the connection between the gothic and the horror types of fiction; there is much less science fiction in dark fantasy than in high fantasy. At the discussion stage, it was determined that the best method for translating the lead when working with two multi-genre works is the comparative method, which is based on a simple principle: “What is it like?” As a result, we came to the conclusion that, on the one hand, the use of a methodological method leads to the fact that in the process of text analysis it is necessary to limit the framework to the conventions of the functional style, the genre uniqueness of the analyzed ones, preserving their artistic orientation and the idiostyle of the author. On the other hand, in this way we get the opportunity to carry out parallel search and optimization of data for its synthesis and translation into the exchange part.