Analysis of Universal of Sentences with the Conjunction “как” on the Basis of the Parallel Corpus of Russian and Chinese Languages

Abstract

On the basis of Russian-Chinese parallel corpora, with a focus on academic texts in the social sciences and humanities, this paper examines the universal of как structures in two aspects: equivalence and foreignization. We hypothesize that such equivalence has mixed features. To test this hypothesis, we: 1) classified Russian sentence patterns introduced by как into seven types, four “integral” (for example, the “so that” pattern) and three “split” (for example, the “so…that” pattern). A statistical analysis of Russian как structures and their Chinese equivalents found that equivalence distributions differ between the two languages, with Types Two and Four in the integral group and Type One in the split group having the greatest equivalence; 2) tested the foreignization hypothesis by comparing the distributions of Chinese structures corresponding to как patterns in a translation corpus and a comparable corpus: 正如 (zhengru, just as), sentence-final 因为 (yinwei, for), and the idiomatic structures 如此……以致 (ruci…yizhi, so…that) and 没有……就 (meiyou…jiu, if not…then). Translators tend to follow the conventions of the source language, Russian, rather than those of the target language, Chinese.