Translation strategies for Chinese cross-border e-commerce websites into Russian: a linguistic landscape perspective

in the context of rapid digitalization and globalization, Chinese cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) websites are actively expanding into Russian-speaking markets. The online linguistic landscape creates a unique environment for content perception, where translation serves not only communicative but also marketing functions. This study aims to identify the main strategies for translating Chinese CBEC websites into Russian, correlating them with the characteristics of the linguistic environment and user expectations. The corpus consisted of texts from ten leading Chinese platforms (product descriptions, navigation buttons, advertising slogans). Content analysis and comparative study of the original Chinese and Russian-language versions were employed. Additionally, a survey was conducted among 50 respondents (shoppers and translator-localizers) to evaluate the adequacy and readability of the translated elements, taking into account the sociolinguistic context. The analysis revealed a predominance of domestication strategies (adaptation of culture-specific realities, conversion of measurement units, currency, and metric designations) when translating interface elements. In advertising texts, a combination of brand name transcription and slogan localization through calquing and paraphrasing is used. Instances of “interlinguistic inserts” – the retention of English terms to maintain an international image – were also identified. The survey confirmed that proper cultural and social adaptation increases trust and promotes conversion.

strategies, translation, cross-border e-commerce, linguistic landscape, Chinese websites