Corpus analysis of the translation of culture-specific lexis in texts of Russian-Chinese cultural exchange

Abstract

The article examines the translation of culture-specific lexis in texts of Russian-Chinese cultural exchange as an area where two opposite demands meet. Official and promotional communication needs recognizability, normative consistency, and immediate readability, while the texts themselves are built around cultural specificity – festivals, artistic forms, historical names, ideological formulas, museum realia, and tourism imagery. Excessive smoothing therefore weakens the very object these texts are meant to communicate. The material consists of a pilot sample of 14 open-access texts published in 2024-2025 on official Russian and Chinese websites and in Russian-language promotional reports on cultural events. For the analytical fragment, 24 culture-specific units were manually selected and annotated. The study demonstrates that the corpus is dominated not by extreme domestication or extreme foreignization but by intermediate solutions: hybrid naming, calque with minimal explication, descriptive rendering at first mention, and shorter normalized forms in subsequent mentions. Stable formulae are most visible in official discourse, whereas tourism and museum texts show stronger dependence on the presumed knowledge of the target audience. The article’s contribution lies in treating heterogeneous texts of cultural exchange as one translation field rather than as isolated genres.