Contrastive Analysis of Prepositional-Nominal Constructions in Romance Languages: Linguistic and Translational Aspects

Aim . The study examines the French prepositional-nominal construction with the structural model “indefinite article + preposition 'de' + zero article” and its translation into closely related (Spanish, Italian) and non-closely related (Russian) languages, including a comparison of professional and machine translation. Methodology . Over 200 examples of phrases from French literary works and their translations into Spanish, Italian, and Russian were analyzed using continuous sampling. Functional analysis of linguistic units was applied to process the collected data. A comparative analysis of the text corpus was conducted using contextual and structural analysis methods. The study utilized data from professional human translations and machine translation systems (Google Translate, DeepL, Large Language Models, GPT-4). Results. The study found that Spanish and Italian retain a similar structure, whereas Russian requires syntactic transformation. Typical machine translation errors were identified, such as redundant articles in Spanish and incorrect case usage in Russian. Research implications. The results can be applied to further research on the article system in Romance languages, to advance contrastive linguistics in expressing definiteness / indefiniteness in closely and non-closely related languages, to improve machine translation algorithms, and to enhance the methodology of teaching Romance languages.