Moscow University Translation Studies Bulletin. 2017. 3.

Now that the vast majority of countries are becoming interdependent both economically and politically and peoples are striving, inter alia, to preserve their national identity, whose main vectors are national languages, ensuring successful communication through translation generates interest among specialists in the field of translation theory and methodology, as well as cross-lingual and cross-cultural communication.

The Russian school of interpreting prides itself on its rich traditions established by researchers in the second half of the 20th century.

Today, interpreting theory and methodology issues are once again in the focus of the attention of international researchers, including those in China.

Thus, we deem it important to analyze the fundamental features of the Russian school of interpreting and its evolution.

Humanity has achieved a very valuable understanding of the essence of translation during the long period of translation practice. However, researchers in the past paid more attention to the translation product, while research into the thinking mechanism of translators/interpreters was of little interest to them. Therefore, the conclusions or methods obtained could not be effectively applied to translation practice and translation pedagogy. Through the use of the semantic triangle theory, the authors of the present paper try to describe the fundamental principles of translators and interpreters’ work with the help of a series of experiments in order to learn the translation/interpreting essence through studying the translation/interpreting process.

This article examines the main features of the modern Russian school of interpreting. The relevance of Chinese researchers’ attention to the Russian translation school is primarily due to the rapid development of relations between the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China in the field of politics, economy, culture, science and education, the need to ensure mutual understanding in the dialogue between Russia and China, and also professional translators’ interest in the formation of new approaches and effective teaching methods. The purposes of the article are to consider the main periods of the formation of the Russian school of interpreting, to build a history of the development of interpreting in Russia in the 20th and 21st centuries. On the basis of the analysis, the author concludes that the Soviet school as well as the modern Russian school which has inherited educational traditions from the Soviet one, both have unique features that distinguish them from Western translation/interpreting schools.

This article studies strategies of Russian-Chinese interpretation based on the analysis of discourse coherence. The authors note that through studying and comparing the coherence in Russian and Chinese discourses, the degree of deviation between the source language and the target language can be measured. Meanwhile, the efficiency of interpreting can be accurately evaluated. This research attempts to contribute to further studies of interpretation, including theoretical and practical development in this research field, as well as to improve the quality of training programs. Thus, the quality of interpreting can be improved both theoretically and practically.

Russian and Chinese belong to different language families. They are different in terms of vocabulary, grammar, language usages, etc. Therefore, the issue of how to use some Chinese skills in interpreting is worth discussing. The appropriate use of these skills can greatly improve the quality of interpreting. This paper makes a detailed analysis of some special Chinese lexical means such as four-character phrases, reduplicated words, antonym compound words and repetition. The research results can help professionals in the field improve the speed and quality of interpreting.

The article reveals an essential connection between the mental model existing in the interpreter’s consciousness and the synonymous phenomenon from the perspective of speech generation. Based on this provision, a comparison is made between the translation from the mother tongue to a foreign language (A-B) and the opposite (B-A). It is pointed out that synonymous competence is one of the most important factors for improving the level of translation from the mother tongue to a foreign language. It is suggested that synonymous competence can be considered as a key to the formation and improvement of translation competence, especially the translation model of B-A.

The article provides a linguodidactic perspective on targeted training while taking into account psycholinguistic factors influencing the generation of future interpreters’ response and syntactic synonyms that are close, but not identical, in meaning to one another. The author analyzes the importance of the use of simple sentences in speech as well as possibilities of their usage while considering semantics and the presence of synonymous constructions. The author provides the reader with numerous examples to illustrate the idea that selecting specific syntactic synonyms implies both their deep rethinking on the part of the students and systemic commenting on the part of the teachers.

The article examines the general problems of training Russian-language translators in the PRC and their relevance in the framework of the development of The One Belt One Road Initiative. Based on the analysis of the history of translators’ training in China, the already existing practice of training and its advantages are determined. The importance of human resources as the first driving force behind the promotion of social and economic development is noted, as well as the importance of translators/interpreters who are professionally involved in the cross-cultural communication in the comprehensive promotion of a new model of international and regional economic cooperation. The idea of changing the status of the Russian language in promoting The One Belt One Road Initiative is proposed, which determines the change in the training of translators/interpreters, which, along with the orientation to one language and one country, should be transformed into the training of translators/interpreters in Russian-speaking countries. The importance of combining external and internal factors to achieve results in the historical reconstruction of the training of Russian-language translators/interpreters is shown.

In this paper, we analyze multi-functional features of adverbs by means of studying “也” in the Chinese language and its translation into the Russian language. Within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics, we divide the adverb “也” into two groups: expressing logical meanings and expressing interpersonal meanings. The logical meanings include a traditional composition and joining, whereas the interpersonal meanings contain different modalities.

When the word “也” is used to express logical meanings, translations of this word into Russian vary. It can be translated as “и, и... и, даже, да... и, кто (как, какой) бы ни, так... и, но”. If, however, the adverb “也” expresses interpersonal meanings, it is usually translated as “даже” or “и”. When there is no regular equivalent between Chinese and Russian, the semantic transformation is often used.

The multifaceted function of “也” and its various translations into Russian clearly show the mixed features of adverbs.

The article is dedicated to translations of the Chinese classical poetry anthology “Poems on a Fan” and the ancient Chinese treatise “Dao de Jing” by the Russian poet Valery Pereleshin. The article also describes the history of the creation of the translations, as well as provides a detailed analysis of the translations’ adequacy in the unity of the form and content, i.e. compliance with a miniature form of Chinese poetry and the adequacy of impressions made by the original poetry on the reader. The phenomenon of literary synthesis in translations of “Dao de Jing” is also studied in the article. It describes the difficulty of selecting a genre for the translation of the treatise written in a rhythmic prose. Based on a triple analysis of Valery Pereleshin’s poetic translation (the form, the image of the poem and its compositional structure), the article reveals the aesthetic beauty of the translation and the poet’s rethinking of the philosophical images and ideas contained in the original by means of abstracting specific objectivity and translating the circular structure found in the widespread version of the treatise into a logical and linear structure conformable with the original poem.