Moscow University Translation Studies Bulletin. 2024. 1.

The paper deals with the study of the problems of Russian translation studies formation as an academic science in its theoretical and applied forms. The formation and development history of the famous linguistic translation theory (LTT), which up to the present day has been an officially recognized institutional discipline for scientific and educational activities in the Russian Federation, is traced. In today’s Russian scientific community, along with LTT, new transdisciplinary scientific, theoretical and methodological types of research in the field of translation theory and practice are actively developing. At the current historical stage of development, translation studies is interpreted as a social and humanitarian transdisciplinary science at the intersection of linguistics, cultural studies, communication theory, comparative literature, semiotics, sociology, history, as well as philosophy, hermeneutics, ethnopsycholinguistics and cognitive science, information theory and other related academic sciences and phenomena like “localization” within the framework of algo-cognitive culture. Three groups of paradigms operating in modern Russian translation theory and methodology have been identified: (a) linguistic profile, (b) cognitive profile, (c) discursive profile. Groups “b” and “c” can form the basis for the academic translation paradigm. Th ree types of discourses are introduced into scientific circulation. 1. Translation studies discourse, associated with academic discourse in its theoretical and didactic varieties. 2. Translation discourse which is theoretically and practically based on the first one and serves the translator as their theoretical and practical basis for generating the third type, viz. translated discourse. The last one is a resultant product addressed to the recipients’ reflection sphere. As a result, the author’s “discursive-game cognitive-hermeneutic paradigm” has been proposed as a preliminary model of the desired “academic type translation studies paradigm”.

Following the theory of the author’s outsideness of M.M. Bakhtin, the author of the article proposes to sin gle out two types of the author’s secondary outsideness: intertextual and translational. Secondary outsideness is the departure of the author from a foreign artistic world. The author first plunges into another artistic being, and then leaves it. Intertextual secondary outsideness (transgredient) is the author’s departure from the depicted real life and his/ her resistance, in the creative process, to the artistic world of another author as a world image, the pacification of this influencing world, in which s/he has gotten involved through his/her interest in it, by weakening his/her identity in it. Translational secondary outsideness (transgredient) is the departure of the author-translator with his/her own poetics from both the artistic being of the original and the reality behind it, recreating the identity of the original author on a foreign language soil with the help of a language equivalent in order to create a flickering text as “one’s own”/“alien”. The analysis of the author’s secondary outsideness allows one to reach the level of authenticity of the artistic world created under the influence of another, to see the author’s resistance to another artistic world or his/her dissolution in it.

This article analyzes the formation of the diversity of the genre of the series of novels “The Dark Tower” by Stephen King, as well as the clips of Robert Browning’s poem in the predominant image of the Tower of Roland and the connection with these genre transformations. In the course of the study, the authors analyze the series of novels “The Dark Tower” and the poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”, in particular, the features of the genres, the compositional and stylistic features inherent in these works. When demonstrating the characteristic features of R. Browning’s and S. King’s creative work, it was found that romanticized fantasy per se includes many genre features that differ from the manifestations of horror and classic fiction: fantasy is a genre in the style of high fantasy and concealment, a fairy tale. At the same time, dark fantasy, although it includes most of the traditional fantasy surroundings, is characterized not so much by the interrelationship between its fantasy elements and the narrative, but rather by the connection between the gothic and the horror types of fiction; there is much less science fiction in dark fantasy than in high fantasy. At the discussion stage, it was determined that the best method for translating the lead when working with two multi-genre works is the comparative method, which is based on a simple principle: “What is it like?” As a result, we came to the conclusion that, on the one hand, the use of a methodological method leads to the fact that in the process of text analysis it is necessary to limit the framework to the conventions of the functional style, the genre uniqueness of the analyzed ones, preserving their artistic orientation and the idiostyle of the author. On the other hand, in this way we get the opportunity to carry out parallel search and optimization of data for its synthesis and translation into the exchange part.

Precedent statements are an important intertextual phenomenon that makes it possible to include the work in the body of already existing texts but to actualize the game with the readers’ expectations. A quotation has the potential to perform many functions: it can serve as a direct reference to the author or a specific work, it can imply a broad cultural outlook of the reader, it can form the internal context of the work, as if these quotations were taken from texts invented by the characters themselves, etc. The aim of the article is to analyze the precedent statements in the novel of R. Zelazny “Creatures of Light and Darkness”. The extensive use of different types and levels of precedent phenomena characterizes this fiction novel as a whole. Three Russian translations of R. Zelazny’s novel were used as illustrative material. The method of research is contrastive semantic-syntactic analysis. A number of quotations in the novel by R. Zelazny’s novel initially assumes some “understatement”, when the reader either has to have a broad outlook in order to recognize the reference to the precedent text, or must try to guess what it is about. It is especially interesting when the source of the quotation is unknown and unrecognizable, so there is an interpretive lacuna that serves as a challenge to the reader. Translators look for ways to convey and simultaneously compensate for this reticence by various means, including, in some cases, eliminating the reticence itself (e. g. by introducing a reference to pretexts, although this does not exist in the original work). The results allow us to identify the translation that is closest to the original in pragmatic terms, as well as to conclude that there is some continuity in the translations: while the earlier translations are significantly different, the later translation uses some of its predecessors’ solutions.

Translation quality evaluation is generally referred to as one the mechanisms for translation industry development and the most important tool in the field of translator training, which determines the relevance of the stated topic. The purpose of this study is to review the problems and approaches to translation quality evaluation highlighting the differences in their treatment. The paper focuses on the study of the cognitive-terminological and system-activity aspects of translation evaluation, with special emphasis on the borderline between the process of quality evaluation and its result. An analysis of the term translation quality as used in meta-translation discourse demonstrated signifi cant diff erences in the conceptualization of this notion. In translation theory, the term is generally used as an evaluative indicator of translation results, although in a broader sense it also refers to one of the main categories of translation studies that requires systematic research and description. In meta-translation discourse, translation quality may refer to a fairly high level of translation per se, but in combination with additional descriptive characteristics the term can also indicate diff erent levels of quality, down to the lowest. To assess the results of translation using classical evaluative terms, namely equivalence and adequacy, it is generally necessary to clarify their conceptual content, which corresponds to a particular scientifi c paradigm. The existence of diff erent and/or opposing points of view on the theory and practice of translation quality evaluation is accounted for by the complex and multidimensional nature of the phenomenon under consideration. The novelty of the conducted research lies in the distinction between translation evaluation as a result and translation evaluation as a process considered as a type of intellectual activity. Finally, we developed a model which reflects the structure of evaluation activities in the fi eld of translation. The main components of this model are: the evaluation sphere, the evaluation actor, the object under evaluation (i.e. translation results), the purpose of evaluation activity, the evaluation method, the criteria and the parameters of evaluation. Following the system-activity approach one can take into account various facets of the problem of translation quality evaluation as well as the complex of motives and individual independent steps that determine the end result.

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.

The article discusses the features of the Russian Chinese pidgin against the background of Russian-Chinese intercultural communication from different points of view in terms of the formation and development of regional cultural linguistics. A diachronic study of bilingual advertising communication based on signboards is carried out from the sociolinguistic and linguistic perspectives. The object of the study is the lexicon of two types of pidgin from Chinese-Russian pidgin dictionaries and the Harbin dialect dictionarу as long as Chinese-Russian bilingual signs in the city of Harbin from 1902 to the present day. The change of the dominant language and translation strategy in bilingual advertising communication is analyzed.

This article is a comparative analysis of the concept “Memory” in English and Russian linguistic culture. It studies the English and Russian phraseological means that verbalize the abovementioned concept. The purpose of the article is to consider phraseological units expressing the concept “Memory” in both languages. The relevance of the work is due to an increased interest in phraseological linguistic units, since they capture the archetypes of human consciousness. To achieve the object in view, the definitional analysis method and the descriptive method have been used. The phraseological units reflect the idea of the British and Russian nations about the concept of memory. The author emphasizes the fact that phraseological units have cultural differences in each language. It is assumed that this research will allow us to understand the culture and mentality of the English and Russian ethnic groups.