The discourse word vоt: Functions and difficulties of translation into Chinese

Abstract

Discourse words play an important role in structuring speech, creating text coherence and conveying modality. This article studies the functions of the Russian discourse word “вот” and the analysis of ways to translate it into Chinese. The focus is the versatility of the discourse word “вот”, its syntactic and semantic features. The paper considers the functions of the discourse word “вот”, analyzing the data of the National Corpus of the Russian language. These functions include: pointing to an object, person, or event; transmitting a sequence of actions or events; enhancing emotions (for example, irony), emphasizing attention; organizing discourse through highlighting information or attracting attention; using it as a parasite word in colloquial speech. There are no direct analogues of the discourse word “вот” in the Chinese language. The article analyzes examples including the discourse word “вот” from the Russian corpus, and conducts their comparison with equivalents in the Russian-Chinese parallel corpus of the National Corpus of the Russian language. The comparative analysis revealed eleven Chinese equivalents, however, each of them expresses only certain aspects of the meaning of the Russian word “вот”, which leads to possible semantic losses. Translation difficulties are associated with differences in grammatical and lexical ways of expressing time, pointing to objects and emotional shades in these languages. The article emphasizes that the versatility and polysemy of the discourse word “вот” require special attention when translating from Russian into Chinese. Translation often leads to a loss of speech expressiveness, which underlines the need for further research.