Strategies for Translating Non-Equivalent Lexis and Political Neologisms in Xi Jinping's Discourse: A Linguistic and Translation Perspective

The subject of the research is the linguistic translation strategies, tactics, and transformations used for translating non-equivalent vocabulary and political neologisms from Chinese to Russian. The empirical basis of the study is the contemporary political discourse of the President of the People's Republic of China, Xi Jinping. The thesis is substantiated that, in the context of the intensification of the comprehensive strategic partnership between Russia and China, an adequate translation of terminology with Chinese national specificity serves as an important tool for forming an objective political image of the state. The relevance of the research lies in the fact that within the framework of close cooperation between China and Russia, the need for quality translation of speeches by the leaders of the two countries is increasing and presents a complex task that must be realized through precise selection of translation strategies and methods, in order to avoid misunderstandings and incorrect interpretations in the process of intercultural communication. A comprehensive methodological apparatus was employed, including the method of complete sampling to form a representative corpus of the analyzed units from a bilingual text corpus. Subsequently, a contextual-semantic analysis was used to identify the pragmatic potential of terms in their natural political environment. The main method used was comparative translation analysis, which allowed for the determination of the nature of the applied lexical-grammatical transformations at the micro level. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the proposal of certain translation strategies that allow for the adequate transformation of various types of non-equivalent vocabulary from Chinese to Russian. Four functional categories of the specified vocabulary and their possible translation strategies are proposed for analysis. Non-equivalent vocabulary includes political ideologems and neologisms, digital abbreviations, political metaphors, historical-philosophical concepts, and chengyu. Based on comparative, contextual-semantic, and pragmatic analysis of official texts (materials from the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, works of "Xi Jinping on Governance," the "Belt and Road Initiative"), it has been established that the basic strategies for overcoming the linguistic-ethnic barrier are calque, descriptive translation, transcription with commentary, and pragmatic adaptation (modulation). A strict dependence of the choice of strategy on the type of lexical unit has been identified.