Linguistic-semantic modeling of translation transformations in the context of macro-typological asymmetry of the Russian and Arabic languages

Abstract

This paper is focused on the problem of overcoming macro-typological asymmetry in translating texts from Russian into Arabic and from Arabic into Russian. The paper is dedicated to a comprehensive study of the mechanisms of cross-linguistic meaning transfer in cases where direct transfer (transcoding) proves impossible due to structural interference. Particular attention is paid to the deconstruction of complex verbal phrases, metaphorical expressions, and culture-specific vocabulary in the absence of direct dictionary equivalents. The aim of the research is to develop a comprehensive formal model of linguistic-semantic and syntactic transformations for the Russian-Arabic language pair based on dependency grammars, utilizing the empirical data of parallel text corpora. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that, for the first time, the mechanisms for overcoming lexical-syntactic lacunarity between typologically distant languages (such as demetaphorisation, cross-part-of-speech transposition (recategorization), and syntactic reconfiguration) are presented in the form of computable syntactic dependency trees based on a parallel macrotext. Furthermore, the applied potential of Russian-Arabic parallel arrays is substantiated for the first time by applying the principle of corpus triangulation to identify translation patterns. As a result, the key text adaptation strategies (nominal, semantic, and explicative) were identified and systematized. The results obtained showed that achieving pragmatic equivalence is algorithmically impossible without the structural expansion or reduction of the source graph, and that the use of corpora safeguards the translator from subjective deviations and the phenomenon of "translationese".

Research materials

1. Tatoeba: multilingual open database of sentences and translations. https://tatoeba.org/en/

References

1. Апресян Ю. Д. Избранные труды. М.: Школа «Языки русской культуры», 1995. Т. II. Интегральное описание языка и системная лексикография.
2. Беляева Л. Н., Камшилова О. Н., Пиотровская К. Р. Сетевые лингвистические технологии: коллективная монография. СПб: Изд-во РГПУ им. А. И. Герцена, 2019.
3. Карим Ф. Б. Суффиксальный способ образования новой лексики в русском и арабском языках и его влияние на достижение переводческой адекватности // Научный форум: Филология, искусствоведение и культурология. 2024. № 7 (83).
4. Мельчук И. А. Язык: от смысла к тексту. М.: Языки славянской культуры, 2012.
5. Мутлак А. М. Ироническая метонимия в русском и арабском языках // Journal of the College of Languages. 2024. № 49. https://doi.org/10.36586/jcl.2.2024.0.49.0145
6. Раренко М. Б. Машинный перевод: от перевода «по правилам» к нейронному переводу (обзор). // Социальные и гуманитарные науки. Отечественная и зарубежная литература. Сер. 6. Языкознание: реферативный журнал. 2021. № 3. https://doi.org/10.31249/ling/2021.03.05
7. Руберт И. Б., Киселева С. В., Миронова М. Ю. Перевод многозначных и синонимичных терминов английского языка: возможности когнитивного подхода // Вестник Волгоградского государственного университета. Серия 2. Языкознание. 2021. Т. 20. № 4. https://doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2021.4.14.
8. Храковский В. С. Очерки по общему и арабскому синтаксису / отв. ред. Г. В. Церетели. Изд. 2-е, стереотип. М.: ЛЕНАНД, 2024.
9. Alymova E. Cross-cultural lacunarity and translation techniques: a corpus-based study of English, Russian and Spanish: PhD thesis. Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 2022. –
10. Baker M. In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation. 3rd ed. London; New York: Routledge, 2018.
11. Kemppanen H. Empirical and Quantitative Approaches to Corpus Translation Studies // The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Translation Studies / ed. by D. Li, J. Corbett. London; New York: Routledge, 2025.
12. Mel’čuk I. A. Ten Studies in Dependency Syntax. Berlin; Boston: Walter De Gruyter Mouton GmbH, 2021.
13. Saad M., Langlois D., Smaïli K.Building and Aligning Comparable Corpora. // arXiv.org. 2025. 4 Aug. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2508.02555
14. Sharoff S., Rapp R., Zweigenbaum P. Building and Using Comparable Corpora for Multilingual Natural Language Processing. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31384-4

Author information

About this article

Publication history

• Received: June 20, 2026.
• Published: July 30, 2026.

Keywords

• переводческие трансформации
• параллельные корпусы
• Русско-арабская языковая пара
• лакунарность
• грамматики зависимостей
• translation transformations
• parallel corpora
• Russian-Arabic language pair
• lacunarity
• dependency grammars

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)
© 2026 Gramota Publishing, LLC

User license

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)