Analysis of strategies for translating onomatopoeia into Russian in the novel "Sandalwood Death" from the perspective of relevance theory

The purpose of the article is to identify and analyze strategies for the transmission of onomatopoeic vocabulary in the novel "Sandalwood Death" by Mo Yan in Russian translation from the standpoint of relevance theory. The subject of the study is the vocabulary that has a national and cultural identity in the considered work of art. It is recognized that it performs important functions in a literary text: creating the sound background of a narrative, conveying the atmosphere of action, characterization of characters, and an emotionally expressive effect on the reader. The focus is on both onomatopes recorded in Chinese dictionaries and the author's occasional onomatopoeia, reflecting the writer's individual style. The selection includes various types of onomatopoeias that imitate the sounds of nature, animals, as well as words that convey non-acoustic impressions to readers. The methodological basis of the work is the case study method, implemented on the basis of a parallel corpus of examples of onomatopoeic vocabulary extracted from the original text and its Russian translation. The interpretation of empirical data is based on the classification of relevant reconstruction strategies proposed by Xu Qingli and Wang Fuxiang. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the application of the theory of relevance to the analysis of the transmission of Chinese onomatopoeia into Russian. The paper highlights and characterizes the following key translation strategies: 1) direct reproduction or approximate compensation of acoustic sound parameters in order to preserve the auditory image; 2) partial conversion and syntactic adaptation of the utterance to the grammatical structure of the Russian language; 3) semantic compensation, implemented through a description of the source or cause of the sound; 4) intentional omission of onomatopoeia in cases where its rhetorical load is already implicitly embedded in the context. The author substantiates the thesis that these strategies are the result of a rational choice of an interpreter acting as a cognitive mediator (coordinator). It is revealed that with the inevitable loss of phonetic iconicity, the translator reconstructs the meaning using the semantic and syntactic resources of the language. In conclusion, it is concluded that the essence of literary translation lies in aesthetic reconstruction, which is inevitably associated with making compromise decisions. Therefore, it is proposed to shift the assessment of the quality of the translation to the success of conveying the emotional impact of the original.