Literary Translation, Dictionaries and Language Policy: Russification in Soviet Ukraine

The Soviet totalitarian regime not only violated human rights, it pursued an aggressive policy of assimilation, seeking Russian cultural and linguistic hegemony over all Soviet republics. Literary translation was no longer viewed as an apolitical activity and became an ideological weapon and an efficient “means of forced cultural change” (Monticelli). Regime ideologues sought control over both the selection of “reliable” authors / texts for translation and the ways in which these texts were interpreted in the target languages. This policy led to a widespread practice of indirect translations, with Russian intermediary texts as a criterion of fidelity. On the other hand, literary translation was used to assert the hegemony of Russian culture and literature by giving disproportionate prominence to Russian contemporary and classic literature. Translations from Russian literature significantly outnumbered translations from other literatures of the world. 

In Soviet Ukraine, however, the policy of Russification went further and targeted the language itself in order to destroy it from the inside and downgrade its status to a kind of a local patois, a dialect of the Russian language. The intrusion into the structure of the language resulted in numerous changes that violated the norms of Ukrainian pronunciation, spelling, word-building, grammar, and syntax. It was accompanied by a massive use of Russian calques and the substitution of Ukrainian words and idioms with their Russian equivalents. Authentic Ukrainian words, different from their Russian counterparts, were marginalized and labelled “artificial elements” or “nationalistic forms,” which purportedly hindered language development and separated Ukrainian from the Russian language. Such words often faced lexicographical deactivation, because dictionaries served as another important tool of assimilative language policy. This lexicographical practice had a far-reaching adverse effect on literature and book publishing. Dictionaries became prescriptive reference books and the source of lexical checklists — a tool to exercise linguistic censorship by publishing editors. This meant that the ideological vetting of literary translations was followed by a linguistic vetting, and this made the Ukrainian experience quite dissimilar from that of other Soviet republics.

Extensive repressive practices and tight ideological constraints in Soviet Ukraine gave rise to translators’ activism and cultural resistance.  A number of translators took on new roles, in particular – the roles of translation gatekeepers and language guardians in a situation of asymmetrical power relations and under a threat of linguicide.

This will be a hybrid event.

For more information and the webinar link, please see http://www.swedishcollegium.se/subfolders/Events.html.