Redefining Translation Spaces in the Soviet Union: From Revisionist Policies to a Conformist Translation Theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Due to its manipulative potential and ability to create deliberate distortions, translation has become instrumental for many projects that involve culture and identity manipulations. In some political and social contexts, translation may serve as a driving force for deliberate and consistent intervention by power holders in order to modify and exploit the nation’s mindset, its cultures and identities for political purposes. For such manipulative strategies, translation becomes essential as it contributes to the propagation of a given ideology by conveying it in different languages, and aids in creating and sustaining a state-sponsored conformist identity. This paper analyzes such a case in relation to the evolution of Soviet translation and translatology in the context of a totalitarian state. By examining the role of translation in a series of forced cultural reorientations that are a part of Russian national history, we explore how translation was used to impose a supranational Soviet identity. We also present how the ongoing disputes surrounding translation policies and translation methods in the Socialist state resulted in the emergence of two opposing schools of thought: one that studied translation within the paradigms of structuralist linguistics, and the other that advocated for a literary approach. By framing our analysis of the Russian translatological discourse within the context of Soviet ideology and the rise of totalitarianism, we demonstrate how each of the schools manipulated the official state ideology in a struggle for recognition. We also seek to explain how linguistic structuralism came to represent the dominant theoretical framework for Soviet translation science, thus relegating to oblivion the “realist” approach to translation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".