Moscow University Translation Studies Bulletin. 2019. 4.

Translation is an art based on science that makes technology develop. The modern age is marked by the transition of mankind to a new stage of development and new challenges that make us reflect on the future of a whole range of different professional activities. Translation is no exception. Translation activity in the digital age is a complex system of heterogeneous interactions within the “man — smart machine (AI)” tandem. This work system can be defined as digital translation. The digital translation that uses digital technology as part of the creative process aims to improve the efficiency of translation art and the quality of translation products. On the one hand, it links up the translator’s art with AI performances and creates a win­win situation; on the other hand, it provokes wariness and suspicion. The emergence of digital translation affects three main areas: 1) cognitive and technological, i.e. all the issues related to possible correlations between translation technologies and digital information and communication technologies in the modern world; 2) social and economic, i.e. all the issues of potential social transformations that may have an impact on translation as a profession in the subsequent 20 years; 3) pedagogical, i.e. all the issues concerning translators’ training for an efficient and smooth operation of today’s digital society.

This article attempts to analyze the psychological activity in the translation process from the perspective of Gestalt psychology and to identify psychological factors that affect the translator’s thoughts and word choosing. In addition, the analysis of the poetic translation from Chinese into Russian reveals the advantages of image thinking for translators as well as some features of the Chinese language and translatibg Chinese poetry.

The article studies the history of Bible translations into Russian, various styles and principles of translation as well as personality traits of translators who participated in the undertaking viewed as a milestone in the Golden Age of Russian language and literature.

The history of translation and interpreting activities in China goes back centuries. In spite of the well­known periods of China’s isolation from the outside world, translation and interpreting training has been carried out for centuries, as different dialects have existed in China from time immemorial. Therefore, for the purpose of ensuring communication between representatives of neighboring regions of the Empire language mediators were frequently needed. This article provides a historical overview of foreign language teaching as well as the translation profession in China from the earliest times to the present day, describing activities in translation and interpreting centers and schools.

This paper coins the term “The Soviet Model of Russian Translation Teaching in China.” The formation process of this model is analyzed, and the content of this concept is specified. The analysis of the historical meaning of this model, which had a profound influence on Russian translation teaching in China, is based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. A review of historical sources of teaching Russian translation in China, their current situation and prospects is carried out.

This article considers the features of the development of the theory of interpretation in China as well as the status of the study of the Soviet school of interpretation in China. In order to find an answer to the question “Why the Soviet school of interpretation was not widely recognized in China?” the author not only considers the similarities and differences between the first works of the French and Soviet schools of interpretation which studied important mechanisms of the interpretation process, but also pays attention to such factors capable of influencing the vector of development of a theoretical school as politics and a social environment.

The paper is focused on finding ways to exploit enhanced capabilities of corpus­managers, particularly the Regex function, utilizing wildcards in queries. The basis for this study derives from the experience, by all means successful, of utilizing this resource coupled with ad­hoc corpora by inexperienced translators to overcome translation difficulties. Since not entire potential was taken advantage of, the authors suggested that more complex functions could be useful for weathered translators, who would use them not to look for linguistic data but rather check their assumptions. To test the hypothesis the researchers carried out an experiment involving two groups of translators, experienced and beginners, who were asked to provide TAP (think­aloud protocol) [Someren, Barnard, Sandberg, 1994: 1] based translations of a passage. The analysis not only covering actual solutions and operations of the informants but also extrapolating their actions to potential outcomes is backed by examples. The authors came to the conclusion that Regex is a worthy thing given good language proficiency and subject savvy of the translator. Besides, the accuracy of queries, which comes inevitably as the specialist’s language proficiency improves and has an advert effect on the efficiency of linguistic data retrieving from a corpus, will be offset by wildcards. If used expertly, regular expressions provide flexibility making up for the lack of fuzzy string search [Bast, Celikik, 2013: 2] in corpus­managers.

At the moment, Russia and China witness the best period of their relations, and more and more directions to cooperate emerge in the field of humanitiеs. The linguistic landscape of the Chinese and Russian languages is one of the most important aspects of such cooperation. The present article examines the trends in the development of the linguistic landscape research in the Chinese language from 1987 to 2019. Recently, in China research into the linguistic landscape has been carried out through the use of sociolinguistics and translation techniques. The theoretical basis of the research is rather poor since it lacks innovation and creativity. The issue becomes especially acute when it comes to the linguistic landscape in a two­way Chinese­Russian translation. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the results of the linguistic landscape research in China in order to present a new perspective on the linguistic landscape to Russian students, thereby increasing the number of works on this issue for the Russian and Chinese languages.

The article analyzes the features of the technical text “tender” and provides a comparative analysis of the lexical and syntactic features of such texts. The main problems that translators encounter when translating terms from Chinese to Russian are considered. The author demonstrates the need for an accurate understanding of the lexical and syntactic features of the text “tender” and THE influence of the degree of competence on the result of the translation process.

This paper expounds the concept of variability in Chinese through discussing the classical translation theories put forward by Yanfu, trans­variation theories introduced by Huangzhonglian and the application of variational translation in literary translation as cross­cultural mediation. It concludes that since variational translation only transmits certain information selected by the translator from the original text for certain purposes, such translation may best satisfy certain readers’ needs.