The Phenomenon of Lacunae and Strategies for Their Compensation in the Russian Translation of Yu Hua's Novel To Live

Abstract

The phenomenon of lacunae in intercultural communication represents one of the most striking manifestations of mismatches between national languages and cultures and constitutes a central challenge in literary translation. Yu Hua's novel To Live is deeply imbued with historical and cultural content reflecting the specific features of 20th-century Chinese society. Consequently, linguistic peculiarities and cultural symbols inevitably give rise to both linguistic and cultural lacunae when rendered into Russian. This study focuses on the 2014 Russian translation of the novel by Roman Georgievich Shapiro. Employing methods of literary analysis and close textual examination, the paper classifies types of lacunae and analyzes the translator's strategies. The research reveals that these lacunae fall into two primary categories: linguistic (lexical, grammatical, and stylistic-rhetorical) and cultural (material and spiritual). The translator consistently combines domestication and foreignization strategies, employing transliteration, calquing, descriptive substitutions, and other compensatory techniques. Despite occasional inaccuracies, the overall adequacy of the source text rendition and the achieved artistic effect remain high. The findings of this study broaden the interpretive perspectives on the translation of To Live and may serve as a methodological reference for translating contemporary Chinese literature into foreign languages.