Lexical-semantic problems of translating 18-century Russian philological works into Chinese

The subject of this research is the lexicosemantic difficulties that arise in translating Russian philological texts from the 18th century into Chinese. The focus is on the philological works of this era, particularly the writings of V. K. Trediakovsky, A. P. Sumarokov, and M. V. Lomonosov, which are regarded as significant sources for the formation of domestic philological science and literary language. The object of critical analysis includes fragments of existing Chinese translations of these texts, included in modern academic publications (the collection of articles "Semiotic System of Scientific Behavior," the monograph "History of the Russian Language and Culture"). Special attention is paid to translation problems such as rarely used meanings in the modern context, obsolete meanings, as well as foreign borrowings and calqued units, whose semantics have undergone significant changes from the 18th century to the present day. A comparative analysis of originals and translations is conducted with the involvement of historical and etymological dictionaries of the Russian language. The work has a practical orientation and draws attention to the Russian language of the 18th century, which is still underexplored in Chinese Russian studies. It is shown that ignoring the historical development of lexical semantics, focusing exclusively on modern meanings of words, and misunderstanding the context lead to a distortion of the original meaning. To address the identified problems, the necessity of employing historical dictionaries of the Russian language, etymological and contextual analysis, as well as differentiating the semantics of terms in their historical functioning, is justified. The results of the research confirm the need to reconsider the traditional approach to Russian-Chinese academic translation, which primarily emphasizes modernity at the expense of the historical development of the language. These results may be useful for Chinese translators engaged in translating pre-Pushkin texts, as well as specialists in historical lexicology and Russian-Chinese translation studies.