Translation Universals of Discourse Markers in Russian-to-Chinese Academic Texts: A Corpus-based Approach

Abstract

Summary The existing research on translational universals (TUs) has so far been confined to limited language pairs such as English-German, English-French, Hungarian-English, Polish-English, English-Chinese, and Scandinavian languages with English being the focus. If the “translationese” or features of translational language that have been uncovered on the basis of translational English are to be generalized as translational universals, it is necessary that we should find proof or evidence from non-European languages or two typologically different languages such as Russian and Chinese. This paper, on the basis of self-compiled parallel Russian-Chinese corpora and comparable non-translational Chinese corpora of academic texts for humanities and social sciences, explores potential features of translational Chinese by taking translation of discourse markers (DMs) as an example. Through statistics and observation, this research concludes with four tentative translation universals: simplification, implicitation, strengthening and normalization among the translational Chinese of Russian DMs. Underlying reasons may lie in both typological differences between two languages and translators’ choice of either target texts (TT) convention or source texts (ST) convention.