Birth of a discipline? Soviet Translation Studies in the 1920s

Brian James Baer

doi:10.4312/stridon.4.2.5-28

Authors

Brian James Baer Kent State University, United States of America

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4312/stridon.4.2.5-28

Keywords:

perevodovedenie, Soviet Translation Studies, disciplinary mapping, State Academy for Artistic Sciences, State Institute for the History of the Arts

Abstract

This article proposes four characteristics that define a field of study as an academic discipline and then applies them to early Soviet efforts regarding the study of translation, referred to as perevodovedenie. The article focuses on the scholarly activity of two Soviet cultural institutions of the 1920s, the State Academy for Artistic Sciences, in Moscow, and the State Institute for the History of the Arts, in Petrograd, then Leningrad. Both institutes created subcommittees on translation, which hosted lectures as well as other scholarly activities, such as the creation of a Translation Studies bibliography. Key figures in the promotion of perevodovedenie at this time are also discussed. The article challenges the dominant narrative of the field, as consolidated in the many English-language handbooks and encyclopedias, that situates the emergence of Translation Studies in the post-World War II West and that construes writings from before the war as non-scholarly.

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