Precarious Planning of Translations into the Ukrainian at the Turn of the 1930s in the Context of the Soviet Canon Formation of Translated Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based on an analysis of archival documents, this paper illuminates a part of Ukrainian history with which anglophone readers may be unfamiliar. This study, overall, makes the case that translation is in fact an integral part of Ukrainian cultural history, not merely an addition to it. This paper examines the typescripts of three lists of foreign literary works recommended for translation and publication in the early 1930s that the author recently found in the archives of the Hryhorii Kochur Literary Museum in Irpin: “Spysok tvoriv chuzhozemnykh literatur, shcho ïkh bazhano pereklasty v pershu cherhu” (“A List of Works of Foreign Literature That Should Be Translated First”) along with its introductory note “Do sektora ‘Literatury i Mystetstva’” (“To the Literature and Art Section”); “Literaturna biblioteka: Proekt plianu” (“Literary Library: Draft Plan”); and “Biblioteka suchasnoї svitovoї literatury: Prospekt” (“Library of Modern World Literature: Prospectus”). This paper discusses both the bright and the dark sides of the planning of translations of texts into the Ukrainian: the analyzed lists, simultaneously, testify to the flourishing of the translation industry in Ukraine at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s and display the Bolshevik regime’s increasing suppression of freedom of choice in translation. The discussion focuses on the contents of each list (that is, choices of authors and works) from an anthropological point of view, exploring the reflection of the literary and cultural tastes and demands of early Soviet Ukrainian society as seen in the publishing plans of leading Ukrainian experts on world literature of their time. These publishing plans were later directed and limited by Soviet censorship on the eve of the mass political purges in the USSR.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".