,
Enrique Federico Quero-Gervilla
https://doi.org/10.31261/pr.23276
This article addresses the translation challenges posed by the Russian lexeme бултых, a syncretic linguistic unit functioning simultaneously as an onomatopoeia and ultra-instantaneous verb. Drawing from a contextualized corpus extracted from the Russian National Corpus, the study analyzes 102 real-world examples in which this lexical unit appears to evaluate the particular translations provided by the neural machine translation systems Google Translate and DeepL. The main objectives of this study are: (1) to examine the semantic and morphosyntactic structure of бултых; (2) to assess the quality of the automatic translations available; (3) to classify the most frequent errors made by the neural machine translation systems; (4) to identify the key factors to consider when translating it either as an onomatopoeia or as an ultra-instantaneous verb; and (5) to propose suitable Spanish equivalents that preserve both its meaning and function within a text. The conducted analysis reveals that automatic translation systems have severe limitations when it comes to dealing with culturally marked lexical phenomena, underscoring the need for a detailed semantic-actantial analysis to act as a foundation for more accurate translation decisions to be built on. Specific recommendations are also offered for improving the translation of this complex linguistic unit.
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No. 3 (195) (2026)
Published: 2026-09-19
10.31261/pr
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Język Polski
Русский
English