Articles

The article is dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the publication of the article by the famous Soviet linguist A.A. Reformatsky “Issues of the Theory of Translation”, which played a signifi cant role in determining the status of the science of translation in the system of Russian humanitarian scientifi c knowledge. The article discusses the concept of A.A. Reformatsky in relation to the theory of translation as a fi eld of scientifi c knowledge, his interpretation of some theoretical issues of translation from the standpoint of linguistics at the beginning of the second half of the 20th century.

The Russian terminology school is one of the three major terminology schools in the world. It has always been focusing on the research of terminology and the standardization of scientific and technological terms. Since the 1990s, Chinese scholars Zheng Shupu and his students have begun to introduce Russian terminology theory to China. Russian terminology has profound theories, many schools, and strong practicability, which is of great benefit to terminology studies in China. Terminology research has a long history in ancient China and involved various fi elds of ancient social life. Th e terminology community should be committed to digging out the origins, the formation and the development of Chinese terminology, revealing its development phase and characteristics, researching methods and outstanding achievements, reproducing the evolution history of terminology research, reproducing China’s unique state-of-the-art culture and terminology system, clarifying the important results of terminology research, etc.

This article is devoted to the study of the problems of intercultural communication in the North Caucasian region. The relevance of the study lies in a detailed diachronic analysis of the historical, cultural and ethnolinguistic features of the interaction between representatives of Russian culture and the culture of the peoples of the Caucasus. The aim of the study is a diachronic analysis of the main aspects of interaction between the peoples of the North Caucasus and the Russian Empire, starting from the second half of the 18th century and ending with the problems of present-day intercultural communication. For a comprehensive analysis, the works of Russian historians, sociologists and linguists are used as a reference material in the work, in addition to the diachronic approach, some approaches of foreign cultural scientists are used. The results of the study are reflected in the comparison of the historical, cultural and ethnolinguistic features of cultural polymorphism in the North Caucasian historical and cultural region, carried out using the integration approach of T. Adorno. To maintain the principles of historicism and objectivism, a historical source is used, viz. “The latest geographical and historical news about the Caucasus” by S.М. Bronevsky, contemporary with the events described. Bronevsky not only prepared most of the material on the Russian-Persian, Russian-Turkish and Russian-Caucasian treaties by the beginning of the second stage of the Caucasian War, but also left comments regarding the ethnolinguistic features of the content of these documents. For example, their inconsistency or the incompetence of Russian translators. The historical experience of modern historians I. F. Blaramberg and Yu.Yu. Klychnikov provides further underpinnings. On the basis of the studied material on the 18th and 19th centuries in relation to the southern political direction, a brief description of the modern ethnic and sociolinguistic features of the region is given.

The article deals with the comparative aspect of the semantics of English, German and Russian idioms, representing the value of consent as the basis for successful interaction and communication. The material of research is English, German and Russian idioms, expressing consent and their contexts of use from the British National Corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the National Corpus of the Russian Language. The results of research show that the basis for agreement in different languages is understanding, mutual understanding, friendly relations, the ability to build communication, trust, the state of mind. In different languages, a figurative variation of consent in idioms and their different use as functional correspondences in translation are found. So, the inner form of similar in meaning idioms imposes restrictions on their use in contexts and accordingly affects the possibility of using them as equivalents.

The article dwells upon the study of speech acts produced within the frames of the English academic discourse wherein the illocutionary act represents an ultimate unit to consider. Hence, there is an attempt made herein to look into the notion of performativity of English verbs, with the verb “to suggest” being an integral part of the English modals can/may-comprising constructions and playing a key role in this analysis. The field of this study is dedicated to the semantics of an event in academic medical discourse, aimed at revealing the possible trends for mental representations in the course of medicine-related texts reading as well as modelling possible scenarios of such events and their occurrence. 

The aforementioned information with due account of such terms as plausibility, certainty and likelihood that are of high importance when it comes to the medicine and health-related topics, brings across the purpose of this study. This work is thus aimed at proving (and finding the corresponding evidence or reasoning) the fact that the verb “to suggest” belongs to the performative ones. Such methods as due observation and systematic analysis help us reveal the comprehensive properties of the verb “to suggest” as a basis underlying the author’s intentions and representing the new special type of performatives named “implicitly assertive” as suggested by Y.M. Suleymanova in her study dedicated to the performative types. 

In the course of this study, we consider a handful of possible scenarios with can/may-comprising constructions following the main clause introduced by the verb “to suggest” and apply the theory of speech acts developed by J. Austin. The findings we obtain herein bring us to the conclusion that the verb “to suggest” should be referred to as a performative verb, belonging to the so named class of “implicitly assertive performatives”.

With the continuous deepening of relations between the PRC and the Russian Federation, sports exchanges and cooperation between the two countries are becoming more and more active, and China’s demand for sports translators with Russian as their working language is also growing. At the same time, the holding of the 24th Winter Olympic Games imposes new requirements for the training of professional translators in Chinese universities. Currently, the effectiveness of training specialists in this field in higher educational institutions in China leaves much to be desired, which leads to a serious shortage of sports translators from Russian into Chinese. Object: to propose strategies and consider models for training Russian language translators based on market needs. Methods: comparative analysis, generalization, correction and systematization. Findings: the main reasons for this shortage are: lack of a sufficient number of applicants who want to learn Russian; lack of motivation for students to learn Russian; lack of a clearly defined strategy for training specialists in this direction; similarity of educational programs in the specialty “Russian language”; lack of qualified teachers teaching “sports Russian”; lack of new educational materials and textbooks in this area. Conclusions: in order to overcome the above bottlenecks, higher educational institutions of the People’s Republic of China should be aware of the current situation and actively respond to it, namely, to study scientific models for training sports translators from the Russian language, develop rational curricula, form professional teachers, improve student teaching methods, produce new teaching materials and accelerate the training of interdisciplinary specialists who speak Russian well, have sports knowledge, creative thinking and an open worldview. These measures are designed to facilitate the work on the training of Russian language translators in Chinese universities and are designed to facilitate the work on the training of Russian translators in Chinese universities.

Sight interpreting is an important part of the interpreter training process. The methodology of teaching sight interpreting should correspond to the characteristic features of this type of interpreting and at the same time serve as a preparatory stage for further simultaneous interpreting training. In order to improve the quality of training of Russian-Chinese and Chinese-Russian interpreters working within the framework of the One Belt, One Road initiative, an independent course “Sight interpreting” is offered at the School of Russian studies of Beijing Foreign Studies University (hereinafter referred to as BFSU). This article focuses on the features and difficulties of this type of translation activity and describes the whole process of teaching at BFSU in order to provide a methodological experience for the training of professional interpreters.

In the article it is shown that the gap between learner lexicography and cognitive methodology can, and should be, narrowed in an ongoing way and on a step-by-step basis. Dictionaries for learners of English are becoming increasingly corpora-based, and this factor brings foreign language users closer to authentic (or real) English. At the same time, however, bilingual dictionaries lag behind as they do not always take into account the results of research work related to thinking processes, mental lexicon, and cognitive mechanisms of language learning and language use. It is therefore essential that different aspects of learner lexicography be examined, updated and adapted to the most recent discoveries of cognitive linguistics and cognitive methodology. With this in mind, it is demonstrated in the several successive subsections of the present article how illustrative phraseology, i.e. select lists of collocations and utterances, included in the learner’s business dictionary, can be re-worked and reorganized through the synchronization of cognitive and communicative planes for teaching both Business English and translation for business purposes to advanced Russian-speaking students at English Departments at universities across the Russian Federation. The main goal is twofold: to bridge the gap between theory and practice, and to combine the author’s conception of Business English with the author’s theory of translation for business purposes. The combination of the two original conceptions makes it possible to re-structure the list of headwords comprising both core business terms and high-frequency lexical items within the third edition of the learner bilingual business dictionary. The underlying cognitive-communicative methodology is applied to all the five elements of the dictionary entry, viz. the headword, its English-based definition, its Russian equivalent (or equivalents), the Russian-based definition of the headword, and the listing of high-frequency collocations and contexts that illustrate how the word or the core business term should be used in spoken and written business discourse.

Today, in the era of digitalization, the development of modern technologies has had a significant impact on all aspects of public life. Translation didactics and translation activities are no exception. The objective of this research is to identify new translation competencies in the process of translation training so that the translator can meet the requirements of the present-day market. The author defines the concept of translation competence, writes about its changes in connection with modern conditions and suggests methods for its formation during translation training, based on the experience of modern Russian and foreign scholars. Moreover, the article identifies the challenges that a lecturer may face when teaching translation. The author uses a comparative method as she compares different approaches to the concept and content of translation competence. The author concludes that any modern translator must have traditional competencies that have been taught for many years along with new ones related to digital technologies.

Any translation and especially that of poems from one language into another is accompanied by compensation, since the presence of rhyme, meter, figures of speech and emotional tension is inherent in the poem, and the transfer of all these poetic elements is impossible from the source language into the translating language. This article, relying on the comparative method and translation methods, examines the ways of compensation used in the Russian translation of Saadi Shirazi’s “Gulistan” by R. Aliyev and A. Starostin. The goal is to identify the positions and levels in the poem, where elements of poetic speech are lost, and also to identify the techniques and methods used to compensate for the loss of these elements. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the classification of positions of loss of meaning and poetic elements when translating poems from Persian into Russian, in particular “Gulistan” by Saadi Shirazi, made by R. Aliyev and A. Starostin, and in the study of methods of their compensation. As a result, the authors come to the conclusion that the loss of elements of poetic speech during the translation of Saadi’s “Gulistan” from Persian into Russian is compensated by alliteration, assonance, the use of rhyming words, anaphora, etc.

The article takes into consideration the problem of translating humor in fiction. Regarding the cultural and subjective nature of humor, the author asks the following question: is it possible to translate humor and recreate the effect caused by the original text? The article investigates the Cairo Trilogy (1956–1957), a novel and a family saga by Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006), one of the most widely recognized Egyptian authors and a laureate of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. The novel follows the life of a bourgeois Cairene family ‘Abd el-Gawwad in the early 20th century. The source for investigation is the original text of the novel written in Arabic and its French translation made by Philippe Vigreux (1985, 1987, 1989). The methods are strictly connected with the concepts of dialogism and intertextuality. In an attempt to answer the questions posed, the author considers such aspects of the problem as the effect of the original text and its reflection on common cultural knowledge in humor in order to show some limitations of translation and its ability to recreate humor in free forms. As a result, there have been found such translation tendencies as an explanation of a joke by giving a note; giving a note without explaining the humor; loose inserts by the translator that create humor effect in such fragments where it does not exist in the source text, etc. The author concludes that, despite the fact that the humor effect in the translation is not fully recreated, sarcasm and humor are transmitted “correctly” throughout the text. Here are the questions for further discussion: is it necessary to explain everything? What are disadvantages of giving notes? Are there universally fun things?

Original article: Mansour L. (2010) Traduire l’humour dans La Trilogie de Naguib Mahfouz: La traduc- tion toutes tendances confondues. Idioma 20, Transhumoresques, Bruxelles, Belgique, pp. 113–129.

Translated by Yulia Bogdanova. Institute for Asian and African States, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia. For contacts: jul.bogd1111@gmail.com