Anastasia A. Politova

Translation of toponyms from Chinese into Russian is to be standardized and unified. Scientific methods of description, comparison, and generalization identified the structural and semantic peculiarities of Chinese toponyms. These characteristics have become the basis for an inductively developed method of unification of the translation of Chinese toponyms into Russian. This method eliminates existing communicative errors, standardizes the translation of Chinese toponyms, creates a unified structured system of the translation of Chinese toponyms into Russian, distinguishes interdependent toponyms, emphasizes the features of the internal structure of Chinese toponyms, and unifies the rules of toponyms translation with the rules of other types of proper names in the Russian — Chinese language pair.

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.