Translating Russian Fiction into Chinese: The Specifics in Building Chains of Pragmatic Markers

Abstract

Introduction. Russian writers quite actively use pragmatic markers (PM) to create a speech portrait of a particular character. At the same time, studies have shown that Russian PMs are characterized by increased syntagmatic activity and tend to appear in text not alone but in ‘company’ with other similar units. Goals. The study seeks to analyze the methods employed to translate PM chains contained in Russian literary texts into Chinese — through the example of the markers eto, eto samoe and kak yego (yeyo, ikh). Materials and methods. The paper analyzes a total of 19 contexts from 8 Russian fiction works included in the main subcorpus of the National Russian Corpus — and their Chinese translations. The work employs purposeful sampling, as well as contextual, comparative and discursive types of analysis. Results. The study shows that the Russian eto samoe has no absolute Chinese equivalent in terms of form and function, which presents big challenges for translators. Only few of the latter were able to translate eto samoe using the Chinese counterparts 这个 zhe ge or 那个 na ge. Structural variants of the Russian pragmatic markers eto and kak yego (yeyo, ikh) are often found both in literary texts and Russian oral (live) speech. Translators easily associate the pragmatic marker kak yego (yeyo, ikh) with the full-value expression kak yego (yeyo, ikh) zovut/nazyvajut performing the same search-hesitation function, and the pragmatic marker eto with its Chinese counterparts 这个 zhe ge or 那个 na ge. As a result, when it comes to translate PM chains with the components kak yego (yeyo, ikh) and eto, functional equivalence is achieved much easier than in case of PM chains with the component eto samoe. Conclusions. The ability of pragmatic markers to ‘attract’ to each other further complicates both the procedure of their identification in a text and their translation into other languages.

Keywords

• pragmatic marker
• literary translation
• discursive analysis
• context factor
• stylized speech
• comparative analysis
• syntagmatic activity