On Chinese Translations of Colloquial Russian Pragmatic Approximator Markers: Analyzing Speech Patterns from Literary Fiction

Introduction. Character speech in literary fiction is quasi-spontaneous, and is supposed to resemble mere conversational narratives. To facilitate this, the authors turn to the use of — along with other colloquialisms and tools — pragmatic approximator markers that are to show the speaker’s uncertainty in what he/she is talking about. Such typical markers in Russian are as follows: типа, или там, как бы, вроде (and their structural variations). Presence of the functional units makes character speech more natural but may pose significant difficulties for translators who are forced to look for adequate analogues in the target language. Goals. The study seeks to analyze the identified methods of translating pragmatic approximator markers contained in Russian literary texts — into Chinese. Materials and methods. The paper focuses on 21 contexts from 10 Russian narratives included in the main section of Russian National Corpus and their Chinese translations. The employed methodology comprises targeted sampling, contextual, comparative, and discursive analyses. Results. It has been revealed that the markers traced across examined character speech patterns do correspond to authentic colloquial Russian units, i. e. they perform the main function of approximation, often combined with those of hesitation, xeno-narration (to introduce someone else’s speech into narrative), and delimitation (to mark a beginning, continuation or final part of phrase). Moreover, Russian approximator markers are often used together with other pragmatic units to form various pragmatic chains, which essentially complicates the translator’s tasks. Conclusions. Our analysis shows the most successful method — although a very rare one — is omission of an approximator marker and articulation of its message with other words (4.3 %). The marker is quite often (17.4 %) simply ignored, which by all means significantly changes a character’s speech portrait. And in most cases (78.3%), the marker is translated with meaningful words, closest to the examined markers being some introductory words denoting approximation (47.8 %), and remotest — literal translations characterized by complete loss of meaning (4.3 %). All in all, no completely successful Russian-to-Chinese translation of pragmatic approximator markers has been found. The obtained data pose a problem of identifying pragmatic approximator markers in the Chinese language and establishing bilingual correspondences for such units.

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