METHODS TO TRANSLATE REALIA IN CHINESE-LANGUAGE NOVELS INTO ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN

Abstract

Background. The cultural reforms at the end of the 20th century in China opened to the world a whole variety of genres of Chinese short stories, as well as science fiction and historical fiction. Thanks to the Internet, they are gaining popularity at the present stage of literature formation, expanding the range of genres of online works with new types such as xianxia, xuanhuan, wuxia, which are rich in lexemes that denote the realia of Chinese culture and are of interest to translators. Purpose. The article considers the stratum of equivalent-free vocabulary and reveals a variety of ways to translate realia from Chinese into English and Russian Materials and methods. The research material comprises the popular Chinese short stories of the xianxia genre by the writers Mo Xiang Tong Xiu “Mo Dao Zu Shi” (also known as “The Untamed”), published by Jinjiang Literature City online publishing house (晋江文学城), 2015-2016, and the short story “Divine Doctor: Daughter of the First Wife” by Mo Shu Liu, published by Motie (磨铁图书), 2015. The material was analyzed using the continuous sampling and content analysis method, as well as the lexical-semantic and translation analysis. Results. In this article the authors reviewed the scientific definition of the term “realia”. They also analyzed a new genre of Chinese online literature (xianxia) as one of the rapidly gaining popularity. Examples of realia from two online novels were classified according to the typology by four principles of division (subject, local, temporal, translational). It is defined that the indicated division of analyzed realia while translating them from Chinese into Russian and English manifested itself in creating a neologism, which results in preservation of content and flavor of the translated realia, as well as the descriptive, approximate and contextual types of translation. Practical implications. The practical usefulness of the results of the study consists in the possibility of replenishing the cross-cultural dictionary of Chinese realia with new lexemes and their interpretation in Russian and English, in the use of the analyzed lexemes when compiling the trilingual corpus for linguists, philologists, literary scholars to work with.