The Russian Orthodox Church Through Russian-Culture–Oriented English
While Russia is currently a major focus of controversial attention, it is impossible to overlook the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church (ROCh) plays a very important role in post-Soviet Russia. Making use of the latest achievements in “interlinguoculturology”, we refer to original English-language texts about the ROCh to elucidate some basic issues in that sphere of Russian culture.
Precedent Texts, Russianisms, And The Contribution Of Russian Culture To The Semiosphere
The enormous current interest in the Russian literary heritage reveals itself in, firstly, a steady scholarly focus; secondly, in the extensive translation practice; and thirdly, in its impact on world culture, or what Juri M. Lotman termed the semiosphere. The present paper attempts to analyze which part of this heritage is having an impact globally, and to what degree, and how is this influence reflected in the modern world’s global lingua franca – the English language.
Institutionalizing Russian-Culture-Oriented English
Globalization, accompanied by the unrivalled dominance of the English language, has made it necessary for Russia to resort to English as the second string in inter-cultural communication. However, Russian-Culture-Oriented English (RCOE) may be an adequate substitute while describing Russian culture only if it is institutionalized. The paper shows the way in which this task may be achieved, aiming at precision, consistency, and comprehensibility of communication.
Russian Identity Through The English Language: A Study Of Olga Grushin’s Novels
The paper addresses the issues of translingual creativity within the framework of the World Englishes paradigm. Contemporary Russian Anglophone writer Olga Grushin’s novels are of great interest, as they stand out from other Russian-American immigrant fiction in that the author positions herself firmly as a ‘Russian writer’. Issues relating to her Russian identity, which are represented in the English language of her creative writing, have become challenging and essential for the linguistic community studying bilingualism, as well as transcultural and translingual literature.
Olga Grushin’s The Dream Life of Sukhanov, her first novel (published in 2005), won the 2007 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Washington Post Top Ten Best Book of the Year, and has been translated into 14 languages. Her second novel, The Line, was published in April 2010 and was selected as an Editors’ Choice book by The New York Times. Her third novel Forty Rooms came out in 2016 and received good reviews. Olga Grushin has been living in the USA since 1989 and has been writing exclusively in the English language.
Olga Grushin often exhibits a high degree of code-switching and language-mixing. The other techniques used by the writer are calque translation, explicatory translation, and transcription of personal names. These do not by any means represent an overall typology of the ways the author renders her Russian identity. The present study is intended as a description and analysis of some of the ways bilingualism is productively inscribed in Russian English literature. The combination of English and Russian creates a linguistic product whereby Russian underlies and affects the English of the text. These writings reflect the double vision of the contemporary Russian writer in the USA, to whom bilingualism has become both form and substance. Olga Grushin is inscribing Russianness – Russian identity – into Anglophone texts and leaves a very significant imprint.
«Обыденная» латинизация русского языка в свете глобализации английского языка
“Grassroots” Romanization of Russian In the Age of English Language Globalization
The issue of the Russian language Romanization elicits a lot of controversy. The primary concern among “professional bilinguals” (linguists, English language educators, translators and interpreters) is caused by the lack of universally accepted Russian-English/Cyrillic-Roman transliteration norms. However, the issue that is often overlooked or dismissed as irrelevant is the everyday “grassroots” transliteration practice of “naïve”, or “non-professional” English-Russian bilinguals in different communicative spheres in modern Russia. The paper highlights the significance of “grassroots” transliteration as a contact-induced phenomenon caused by “grassroots globalization” and “grassroots literacy” and addresses various factors contributing to it, with a special focus on the complex interplay between inner/linguistic factors and outer/socio-cultural ones. It is argued that “grassroots” Romanization of Russian is a multi-faceted and crucially significant aspect of written multilingualism and globalization of English research, therefore it needs to be described and theorized thoroughly before any normative Russian-English/Cyrillic-Roman transliteration regulations are considered, both in international and in intra-national communication.
Language, Culture, And World Englishes
Within linguistics there is a strong tradition concerning the hypothesis that language determines thought, and an equally strong reaction against this view. When establishing the field of World Englishes, Braj Kachru reinterpreted the study of language variety as occurring with a sociolinguistic and cultural context of situation.
Русский вариант английского языка или английский язык в России?
Russian English or English in Russia?
The paper focuses on the controversial status of Russian English. The author argues that Russian English is an exonormative variety of the Expanding Circle, according to Kachru’s theory. As a variety, it has its own distinctive linguistic features that can be accounted for by the transfer of the linguistic features of Russian, its users’ native tongue, as well as the users’ mentality and the expression of Russian culture in their speech. The author criticizes theories that describe this variety as a teaching/learning model, or as an interlanguage, and believes Russian English should not be equated with the pidginized basilectal Ruslish/Runglish.
Russia Through Travelers’ Eyes: Between Stereotypes And Personal Discoveries (Notes From A Travel Forum)
The purpose of this essay is to investigate how the image of Russia is negotiated and shaped on the travelers’ forum of the internet portal TripAdvisor. Based on the content and critical discourse analyses of 480 discussion threads, it looks into dominant themes and motifs. Analysis of lexis and tropes has been undertaken to determine how values and emotions are expressed by forum participants. In addition, the ethnographic method of participant observation has been used to become familiar with the prevailing atmosphere and communication style of the forum. Communication between hosts offering advice and help, visitors sharing their experiences of traveling to Russia and forum members who are planning future visits to Russia is an example of collaborative creation of the destination image, in which stereotypes of Russia and its people are questioned, negotiated, and reshaped.
Russian Poetry Live And The Language Barrier
In the early 19th century, Russian poets thought in national rather than ethnic terms, as they sought to increase and extend the Russian repertoire by translating and localizing poetry from Italian, English, French, Greek, and Latin. By the 20th century, Russian poetry was a major part of that European tradition, but still peripheral; Blok’s Dvenadsat’ had nothing like the influence of Eliot’s The Waste Land. In the 21st century, Russian poetry hardly features in international poetry festivals; Russian poets pursue their career abroad through academic exchanges which, while they accommodate any degree of difficulty in poetry, do not expose Russian poets to the various ethnic cultures in modern European and other poetry. This paper proposes a more varied approach.
The Fog-Girt Neva: Pre-Revolutionary English-Speaking Residents Of Russia And Their Encounters With The Linguistic Other
The issue of how to mediate between English-speaking and Russian-speaking cultures long predates the academic study of cross-cultural communication, and this paper examines the topic with reference to the writings of a number of visitors to/residents of Russia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose relationship with the country was not just casual, but based on extended social and in some cases also professional contact. In the early period, communication was mainly through the medium of French, but by the second half of the 1810s, some visitors, such as Robert Lyall, a Scottish physician who had an extensive network of patients in the Moscow elite, had begun to take an interest in Russia. Lyall’s attitude to social customs and practices, if not to the Russian language, was often dismissive, but he did attempt a more accurate transliteration of the language and in some areas, e.g. the common names of mushrooms, was a pioneer. A considerably deeper engagement with Russian life can be found in the work of Charles Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal for Scotland, who visited Russia in 1859 and had extensive contact with scientists in his field. In his writings, an intense and often admiring interest in Russian technology sits alongside a curious appreciation of the multilingual environment of the two capitals. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the increased dissemination of Russian literature and travelers’ accounts meant that readers had a much clearer picture of the country, so that transliterated words were reserved for ethnographical particularities such as the passport registration system. On the other hand, this period also saw the emergence of a significant bilingual population that, despite having British nationality, was effectively Russian in terms of language use; in their writings, the use of transliterated material and cultural references becomes a type of self-othering. The paper concludes by arguing that, in some respects, this diversity of response to the linguistic context allows a correction of the standard argument that Western travelers to Russia during the nineteenth century primarily perceived the country through an ‘orientalizing’ lens, and contends that there was in fact significantly more diversity.
Vermittlung russischer Literatur im deutschsprachigen Raum – Aktivitäten und Erfahrungen
Russian Culture and Russian Literature from the German Activities and Experience
Germany´s book market is the third largest in the world according to the International Publishers Association, after the United States and China and before Japan. Around 75,000 new books are published in Germany each year, around 50 of which represent outstanding non-fiction literature translated from the Russian. While features sections offer less and less space for book reviews, it is crucial to highlight these publications, which play a significant role in the literary world.
Good examples of such efforts are the two large interdisciplinary conferences held to honor major works of Varlam Shalamov and Andrei Platonov, which I translated. The first conference took place in 2007, when Volume I of the Collected Works of Shalamov appeared at the publishing house Matthes and Seitz in Berlin; the second conference was held in 2016, after Platonov’s “The Foundation Pit” had come out in German at the Suhrkamp publishing house.
Both conferences where organized by the publishers in cooperation, among others, with the German Association for East European Studies, the Federal Foundation for the Study of Communist Dictatorship in East Germany, and the Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin (ZfL), as well as the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.
Among those who attended the highly successful conferences were historians, authors and fictional writers, translators, modern language researchers and other representatives from the field of the humanities. An accompanying program offered literary talks, concerts, and screenings of films related to the issues at stake. A special issue of the renowned Osteuropa Journal (Eastern Europe Journal) had been produced parallel to the conference.
Apart from such events, translators also make individual efforts to increase public interest in literature coming from Russia. One of the platforms used for this purpose, which I am involved in, is the organization Weltlesebühne (which would translate into: the world as a reading stage). At special events, translators read from the works they have rendered into German and audiences enter into conversations with those who have read the original more closely than most people ever would.
Quality In Conference Interpreter Training
Professional conference interpreters perform a complex linguistic, cognitive, and communicative task, and have multiple roles: they are professional intercultural communicators and bilinguals (multilinguals), stress managers, public speakers, information processors, problem solvers, and lifelong-learners. Conference interpreter training is practice-oriented, focusing on intensive skill development. Therefore, the main indicators of quality in training are the selection of suitable candidates, the appropriate content imparted during the training, and the skill level of the professional trainers who are practicing conference interpreters themselves. Ensuring quality in conference interpreter training is of utmost importance because, due to the rapid development of ICTs and artificial intelligence, there is more and more speculation about when machines will replace human interpreters.
Beyond Words: Recognizing And Interpreting Allusions In Technical Texts
Marina Platonova, Larisa Ilinska, Tatjana Smirnova
Nowadays, the traditional sources of allusions have expanded considerably under the influence of globalization and technological innovation. New multi-level, multi-modal, and multi-functional allusions are emerging in language, especially in the language for special purposes (LSP). Readers are constantly challenged by authors of modern technical texts to explore new terminological and rhetorical horizons, to get acquainted with new meanings of well-known lexical items, and to experience new stylistic constructs. The paper investigates multi-level allusions introducing the ‘4R approach’ to dealing with the challenges associated with the translation of allusions.
Significance Of Consistent Cyrillization Of Korean Proper Names And Realities Into The Russian Language
The article deals with the problem of unification of cyrillization of Korean proper names and realities into the Russian language. Koreans have been living in the post-Soviet states – including Russia – for over 150 years, and now represent one of Russia’s ethnic minorities. Russian Koreans (koryeo-saram) speak Russian as their mother tongue, and only a few speak the Korean language of expatriates (koryeo-mar) while using the Cyrillic alphabet. In the 1960s, L. Kontsevich and A. Kholodovich created a system for the cyrillization of Korean proper names. Until as late as the 1990s, Korean studies specialists were the only ones who wrote about Korea, and they followed the rules of transcription available at the time. Since the year 2000, a large amount of texts on Korea, written by ethnic Koreans, bloggers and tourists, started appearing. Although D. Ermolovich introduced a system for the transliteration of Korean proper names, not many of those who write about Korea follow its principles. The new Romanization rules adopted in Korea in 2000 only caused further confusion. There is a need to develop clear guidelines for the cyrillization and romanization of Korean proper names, in accordance with the rules of the Russian language.
Роль переводчика в эпоху многоязычия: принцип телейдоскопа
The Role of the Translator in an Era of Multilingualism: the Teleidoscope Principle.
The awareness of cultural identity in a world of language equality has increased the interpreter’s responsibility for the quality of his or her work. Under these circumstances, a primary function of pivot languages is cultural interaction. This articles analyses the experience of using Russian in interpreting scenarios involving Yakut, Kazakh, and other languages.
Русский язык – проводник малого народа в большую литературу (на примере Республики Карелия)
Russian as an Ethnic Minority’s Gateway to Great Literature (the Example of the Republic of Karelia).
Since the foundation of the Karelian Labor Commune (1920), Russian and Finnish were recognized as its literary languages. Karelians and Veps did not even have scripts of their own. As a result, although knowing their native language, ethnic Karelian and Veps writers created their works in one of the Commune’s literary languages. Karelians most often chose Finnish, whereas Veps tended to use Russian.
A majority of ethnic minority writers in Karelia are bilingual, using two languages in their literary output. They most often combine Russian with one of the minority languages, e.g. Russian-Finnish; Russian-Karelian; Russian-Veps. Some write in two minority languages. The most frequent combination is Finnish-Karelian. There is, however, a whole group of ethnic Karelian, Finns, and Veps who have entered the literary world by means of the Russian language. They have either lost familiarity with the language of their people, or have not mastered it enough to create literary works.
The Russian language was the way into the literature of Karelia for ethnic Finns Rejo Takala and Armas Mishin, ethnic Karelian Alexander Volkov, and ethnic Veps Nikolai Abramov. Representatives of ethnic minorities who wrote and now write in the Russian language, such as Ernest Kononov, Toivo Vähä, Raisa Mustonen, and others, contribute to the development of Russian literature in Karelia. Nikolai Laine, Antti Timonen, Paavo Lukin, and Pekka Perttu have laid the foundations of bilingualism in Karelia for the Finnish-Karelian minority language combination. Karelians who mainly write in their native Karelian language (Miikul Pahomov, Ivan Savin) have also produced poems in the Russian language.
Owing to the multilingualism of people living in the Republic of Karelia, minority cultures have the possibility to develop in all their diversity. The Russian language is not just a means of oral communication, the language of literature and periodicals, but also a vehicle that makes minorities accessible to the ‘greater world’ through Russian-language translations of their fiction; authors both borrow topics from Russian literature and write directly in the language of the majority.
* Исследование выполнено при финансовой поддержке РФФИ в рамках научного проекта № 18-001-00001.
Ускользающий «демагог»: перекрестки культур и тупики перевода (из истории политической лексики)
The Elusive Demagogue: Crossroads of Cultures and Dead-ends of Translation (from the Historical Political Lexicon).
The article examines the historical and cultural context behind the word ‘demagogue’ in the Russian and German languages at the end of the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries, and breaks down individual historical layers of meaning, which can be traced in its modern usage but do not lend themselves to translation. Particular attention is paid to the process of attributing new meanings to this word in the situation of linguistic multilingualism and close cultural/political contacts between Russia and Europe in the first three decades of the nineteenth century.
*Статья подготовлена при поддержке РФФИ, проект 18-012-00478.
Big Wrong Data: Making AI (and Big Data) Work In Translation Correction And Feedback Memory
Since many years, research at the KU Leuven Translation Department has focused on translaton revision and translation evaluation. Technology has always been a help. In a partnership with Televic Education, we now started creating our own tools. And whereas most technological translation tools focus only on the correct translation (doing nothing with the error itself), our TranslationQ tool tries to exploit the errors. The idea is to create Big Wrong Data. And to learn from it, of course. The errors (made by (student/all) translators) are often more interesting than the correct translation, because it shows where the translators go wrong or where languages differ. Exploiting those Big Wrong Data gives a helpful insight for (source and target) text analysis as well as for teaching didactics in translation studies
Teaching Retour Interpreting at SCIT
The paper covers the main principles of teaching retour interpreting at the St Petersburg School of Conference Interpreting and Translation. The author describes the main focus areas such as language enhancement, preparation techniques, cultural awareness and general knowledge and outlines a Russian discourse and situation typology, which is used to demonstrate different approaches to handling interpreting challenges.