On Some Principles of Rendering Old Chinese Administrative Terms into Russian

The administrative apparatus played a very important role in traditional China. China’s bureaucracy was the most developed, elaborated and sophisticated in the world of that time. Therefore, all the old Chinese texts, both artistic, historical, and sometimes even philosophical, are full of names of institutions and offices. But there is still no generally accepted system of rendering old Chinese designations of institutions and administrative posts into European languages, in both Russian and Western Sinology. This is not accidental. Any attempt to propose a systematic interpretation of the meaning and translation into other languages of this complex terminology encounters a number of serious obstacles. In this article, we propose and illustrate some principles, using which it would be possible to approach the solution of this problem.