THE ARTISTIC POTENTIAL OF VERNACULAR LANGUAGE IN MO YAN’S NOVEL «LIFE AND DEATH ARE WEARING ME OUT»: A CULTURAL-COGNITIVE ANALYSIS AND THE KAZAKH TRANSLATION

Abstract

The works of the prominent Chinese writer Mo Yan, especially the novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, stand out for their artistic representation – through a national linguistic worldview – of the multilayered nature of historical and social changes in Chinese society and the complex realities of rural space. The novel’s composition, marked by an allegorical system of reincarnation, elements of Buddhist and mythological consciousness, and extensive use of folk linguistic material, deepens its artistic structure and elevates the text to a philosophical and anthropological level. The idea of reincarnation does not confine the protagonist’s fate within a single temporal frame; instead, it reveals the continuity of generational change and historical periods, as well as the ongoing dynamics of fundamental binary oppositions such as guilt and punishment, life and death, and justice and injustice. Within this artistic universe, the mythic-religious layer and social reality intertwine, forming a unified semantic field through linguistic modes of representation.

Accordingly, dialect words, proverbs and sayings, set expressions, colloquial and expressive vocabulary, as well as folk songs and poetic forms in the novel require focused analysis as key linguistic and cultural mechanisms that reveal the work’s national identity. The aim of the study is to identify the cultural and cognitive functions of local colloquial language units in the novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (dialect words, idioms and set expressions, emotional and expressive lexemes, folk verse and songs) and to comparatively describe the specific features of their rendering in the Kazakh translation. In line with this aim, the research examines the semantic structure of these units, their evaluative and expressive colouring, contextual functions, and cultural allusive content, and assesses the degree of semantic equivalence between the source text and the translation. Methodologically, the study employs conceptual analysis (to identify cultural-cognitive notions and conceptual fields), semantic analysis (to describe meaning components and contextual variation), and comparative analysis (to compare source-translation correspondences); as a result, the functions of the linguistic layer in the literary text and the pathways of translational equivalence are systematised.

The findings contribute to systematising the local linguistic layer in Chinese literary texts, clarifying mechanisms through which cultural codes are conveyed by language, and expanding the scholarly basis for evaluating cultural-cognitive equivalence in translation studies. In addition, these conclusions help determine which strategies are most effective for translating units rich in national-cultural content, under what conditions semantic loss occurs, and which functional equivalents best preserve the linguistic colour of a literary text.