Critical Discourse Analysis of the Image of China in the Russian Version of the Report on the Work of the Government with a Case of Russian Verb Aspects

Abstract

Aspect is an obligatory grammatical category of Russian verbs that consists of both perfective aspect and imperfective aspect as a pair. Based on both self-compiled Chinese-Russian parallel corpora of the Report on the Work of the Government (China) (2008-2017) and comparable corpora of the Report on the Work of the Government (Russia) (2008-2017), this paper presents the intra-lingual, inter-lingual and prosodic analyses of the image of China reflected in the Russian version of the Report on the Work of the Government (China): 1) image of China is created by comparing the verb frequency of two aspects in translational corpora and comparable corpora and analyzing the modal meaning and interpersonal function of Russian verbs; 2) ideology in the Russian version is discussed by comparing “V+了1” structures in source texts with its counterparts (long passive participles or imperfective aspect) in target texts; 3) main concerns of Chinese government in the past decade are illustrated by focusing on semantic prosodies of collocates (its types and distributions) with high-frequency imperfective verbs in target texts. It concludes that the image of China in translational texts is populist, flexible, responsible and concerned over its national welfare and people’s livelihood.