The case of the missing Russian translation theories

Abstract

Translation Studies is performed through an international network of relations between largely isolated scholars, many of whom cooperate in order to create knowledge. The sparse nature of the relations, however, coupled with the difficulties of relatively opaque languages and hard-to-assemble materials, means that the cooperative production of knowledge is often fraught with difficulties: the network only vaguely discerns its international extension (rarely reducible to the West vs. the Rest) and has a very sketchy awareness of its own origins. Russian translation theories published between 1950 and 1953 constitute an acute case in point. Although highly innovative precursors of later theories of text types, purposes, and indeed of Translation Studies as a unified field, the formalist theories of Retsker, Sobolev and Fedorov were associated with the final years of Stalinism and were thus strangely cut off from the development of Translation Studies in most other languages. We recount our attempts to locate, construe and make known the translation theories trapped in a very particular time capsule.

Keywords:

• Russian translation theory
• Translation Studies
• translation history
• knowledge networks
• Fedorov

Notes on contributors

Anthony Pym is Professor of Translation and Intercultural Studies at the Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain; president of the European Society for Translation Studies; fellow of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies; visiting researcher at the Monterey Institute of International Studies; Professor Extraordinary at Stellenbosch University.

Nune Ayvazyan is a PhD candidate at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain. She holds a BA in English studies from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Spain) and an MA in Translation Studies from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain).

Notes

1. July 2014: there is always more: Oleksandr Kal'nychenko writes to tell us that text types were linked to translation strategies in 1927, not by any Russians but by the Ukrainian Volodymyr Derzhavyn: “A human language performs simultaneously (but in every particular case to various extents) three functions: communicative, cognitive, and artistic, which are predisposed to translation not in the same degree …. So there exist three types of translation: translation-account, translation-transcription (not used separately), and translation-stylization, only the last one being artistic in one degree or another” (Derzhavyn 1927, 44, translated in Kal'nychenko 2014, 9). Derzhavyn was in part responding to Fedorov (1927, 113), where the translation of scientific prose (ruled by values, not forms) is contrasted to the translation of the poetry (where “accuracy should be to all elements”). But that distinction can be traced all the way back to Schleiermacher, at least. In July 2014 this comes, of course, against the background of non-metaphorical fighting between pro-Russian and other Ukrainians.