These people don't say the equivalent of, for ex., "I'm going to the store to look for a good pair of shoes"?

Well, first off, it'd be in Chinese or Russian. Second off we were talking about words, not sentences.

The languages I listed have no definite or indefinite articles. My suggestion is that you can translate anything from one language to another. It might be wordy, but ...

Ceci n'est pas un seing.