Linguocultural Specificity of Chinese Poetry and Ways to Compensate them in Translation

Abstract

The problem of language and culture correlation has long been the focus of considerable attention in Linguistics. It has recently acquired particular urgency due to the intensive development of linguistic culturology. The article deals with one of the aspects of the “language and culture” issue, namely the language influence on culture based on the linguo-cultural peculiarities of ancient Chinese poetry. The language-specific nature of this poetry is presupposed by the polytonic and isolating system of Chinese language, which results in impoverishing the rhyme and creating the certain monotony of rhythm. All this is also stipulated by hieroglyphic script which stimulates lexical polysemy and semantic integrity of linguistic units. Cultural peculiarity of Chinese poetry, in its turn, is caused by the presence of characteristic poetic genres unique to China, by the presence of cultural and relevant proper names and cultural realia as well as by the presence of special figurative (semiotic) codes in Chinese poetry. All these factors result in considerable difficulties while translating into other languages, especially into European ones. The article considers some ways of neutralizing these difficulties in Russian and English translations. It has been established, in particularly, that translators most often resort to the methods of substantiation, loan translation, and analogue translation. Most often, the external shape of poetry (rhythm, rhyme) has to be sacrifice (omission transformation).