ANALYSIS OF THE RUSSIAN-CHINESE CORPUS OF MEASUREMENT UNITS: GRAMMATICAL MODELS AND TRANSLATION CORRESPONDENCES

Abstract

Measurement units are commonly regarded as the least problematic zone of the Russian-Chinese lexicon for translation, since the metric system is formally identical in both languages and appears to permit direct substitution of an equivalent term. This assumption is examined on the material of the Russian-Chinese parallel corpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language. Russian is a flective language in which a numeral combines with a noun directly; Chinese is a classifier language in which a measure word is structurally obligatory between numeral and noun. The unresolved question concerns the status of the unit of measurement within this system: whether it behaves as an ordinary Chinese classifier, grammatically obligatory but semantically empty, or retains a degree of lexical fullness comparable to Russian nominal measure words. Existing contrastive grammars of nominal quantification describe the classifier system as a whole and rarely isolate metrological units as a distinct case. On the basis of 612 sentence contexts drawn from the fiction and periodical sections of the corpus, four types of translation correspondence are proposed; the boundaries between these types are not always distinct, and a number of contexts could not be classified unambiguously. Historical, non-metric units – the Chinese jin, li, mu, or the Russian pood and versta – constitute a separate problem: their conversion into metric equivalents resolves the numerical side of translation while gradually erasing the cultural connotation carried by the original unit. The sample is not statistically representative of translation practice as a whole, and the resulting figures are interpreted accordingly.