Loan-translation of Chinese idiomatics as a literary technique in Boris Yulsky’s stories

• DOI: 10.20339/phs.4-22.041
• Publication Date: 2022-07-25T14:22:18Z
• Authors: Jiabao Li; Natalia S. Milian...

The article analyzes the loan-translation of Chinese idiomatics in the stories by the Russian writer of the Far Eastern emigration Boris Yulsky. The paper describes 9 expressions, which are characterized by two features: these expressions have a formal and semantic structure that is non-standard for the Russian language; these expressions denote phenomena of Chinese culture. The analysis of the material includes the identification of Chinese sources of calques, comparison of the source and result of calquing, determination of the functions of calques in the stories by the Russian writer. The study showed that calquing is a productive language facility of representing Chinese consciousness and Chinese culture in a Russian literary text. Calques allow in an accessible and at the same time quite authentic form to present to the Russian-speaking reader the realities of Chinese everyday culture and elements of ethno-cultural consciousness. As a result, the Russian reader gets the opportunity to immerse himself in the special reality of a different culture – not just to see it from the outside, like an exotic picture, but to feel it from the inside, through the prism of Chinese linguistic consciousness.