Summary
#e article focuses on prevailing translation methods used in the Soviet translation school. 
#e main aim of the research is to analyze translation strategies, principles and methods used 
by Soviet translators who were forced to work in a cultural vacuum under strong ideological 
inﬂuence. #e absolute priority of domesticated translation in the Soviet translation school is 
compared with strongly criticized foreignized translation. #e primary use of the domesticated 
method of translation depended not on the personal tastes of the translators or current 
tendencies but on an artiﬁcial ideologically inﬂuenced cultural environment which was 
almost completely isolated from foreign cultures. #e whole translation process in the Soviet 
Union diﬀered greatly from that in democratic societies. It was inevitably inﬂuenced by an 
institution of censorship and strict centralization. In spite of all, there were intense eﬀorts 
made by translators to preserve and even expand the horizons of the readers, to maintain a 
minimal cultural level, and to circumvent censorship. 
Key words: Soviet Union, domesticated translation, foreignized translation, ideology, censorship
 Povzetek
Članek analizira prevladujoče prevajalske metode, strategije in načine, značilne za sovjetsko prevajalstvo. 
Glavni cilj razprave je ugotoviti in pojasniti vrste prevladujočih prevajalskih metod v obdobju Sovjetske 
zveze ter vzroke za njihovo rabo pri sovjetskih prevajalcih, ki so ustvarjali v kulturnem vakuumu 
komunistične ideologije. Avtorica pojasni, zakaj je prevladovala izključno metoda podomačitve 
prevodov (domestication), medtem ko je bila metoda potujitve (foreignization) strogo kritizirana in 
se je pojavljala samo v izjemnih primerih. Metoda podomačitve ni bila osebna izbira prevajalcev 
ali prevladujočih smernic v prevajanju, temveč so jo narekovale posebnosti umetno vzdrževanega 
ideološkega okolja, skoraj popolnoma izoliranega od tujih kultur. Prevajalski proces v Sovjetski zvezi 
se je bistveno razlikoval od prevajalskega procesa v demokratičnih državah, saj je nanj vseskozi vplival 
sistem cenzure in stroge centralizacije. Kljub temu so si sovjetski prevajalci prizadevali, da bi obšli 
cenzuro in s tem vsaj nekoliko razširili kulturni horizont svojih bralcev. 
Ključne besede: Sovjetska zveza, podomačitev prevodov, tujitev prevodov, ideologija, cenzura
 DOI: 10.4312/elope.4.1-2.151-159
In the history of translation theory and practice, the pendant of translation focus has swung 
between two extremes: domesticated
1
 (emphasis on the language and culture of the target text) 
and foreignized
2
 (emphasis on the language and culture of the source text) translations. Both 
approaches were ﬁrst conceived and published in 1813 by Friedrich Schleiermacher, (1768 
−1834), the German theologian, in his On diverse translation methods.
Venuti (1995, 20) argues that Anglo-American translation theory has been dominated since the 
seventeenth century mainly by the domesticated method, which intends the translated text to 
conform to the norms of target-language usage. In other words, the domesticated method means 
that the text should be transferred from source to target language in such way as if it had been 
originally written in the target language. #e translator should erase every shred of foreignness 
and create a ﬂuent, idiomatic text. #e typical characteristics of this type of translation are 
“ﬂuency”, “naturalness”, “transparency” and “readability”. According to Nida (1964, 167−70), 
domestication also permits adjustments to “special literary forms”, “semantically exocentric 
expressions” or “intraorganismic meanings”. Naturalness as a key requirement in this type of 
translation should be raised to such a degree that it “bear[s] no obvious trace of foreign origin”. If 
the source text contains linguistic and cultural elements alien to the target language and culture, 
they are likely to be avoided in the translation. 
In contrast, a foreignized translation strategy is more oriented towards the source language and 
the source text. #is type of translation strategies resists contemporary cultural, stylistic and 
idiomatic norms in order to convey the full aesthetic impact of the foreign poetic experience. As 
Venuti declares (1995, 20), it “sends the target reader abroad” instead of familiarizing the text in 
order to facilitate the comprehension. Using this method, the translator is expected to preserve 
the foreign identity of the source text, which means keeping linguistic and cultural diﬀerences 
in the translation. #us, foreignized translation gives readers more information but tends to 
increase the diﬃculty of understanding.
#e classiﬁcation into domesticated and foreignized translation enables us to distinguish between 
the diﬀerent levels of impression made on the target reader by the text (Beliaeva-Standen 2002, 
199). Domesticated translation is more natural and easy for understanding because it is read as 
an original text. Foreignized translation presents foreign language and culture and for that reason 
requires certain details to be rationalized and clariﬁed. In this case, the reader has to discover 

the meaning behind uncommon textual structure and this makes the process of comprehension 
longer and more complicated. 
 In order to understand the position of the Soviet translation school, it is essential to consider 
some important background. Only a few months after the October Revolution, the ﬁrst 
demands were made that literature should be put in the service of communist ideology. #e 
government took over printing presses, replaced writers’ and musicians’ associations with 
state-controlled unions, and shut down theaters and art studios. 
New ideological propaganda dictated harsh restraints on literary production, aiming to purge 
Soviet society of all expressions regarded as destructive to the new order. Henceforth, literature 
and the arts lost some of their public identiﬁcation with civil society and gained a formal place 
in the oﬃcial culture of the Soviet era. An attempt was made for a brief time to totally change 
the cultural orientation of the nation. All this was very evident in the ﬁeld of translations because 
ideology also exerted pressures on literary translations. As a result, any literary text translated in 
the Soviet Union underwent a series of transformations or distortions depending on ideological 
demands. T ranslations of foreign materials had to pass oﬃcial censorship at the Foreign 
Literature Committee
3
 and were not permitted either in small local libraries or even in private 
book collections. #ere were one or two notable exceptions, such as the Library of Foreign 
Languages in Moscow, where an unusually broad range of foreign literature was available to 
everyone – everyone, of course, who had found a way to learn a foreign language well enough.
#e justiﬁcation of censors who worked with foreign publications was to protect the minds of 
the Soviet people from the harmful inﬂuence and infection of the West and to oﬀer the public 
well-selected information concerning foreign cultures. In 1922, the central censorship oﬃce was 
established, known as Glavlit for short, which had absolute authority to censor the performing 
arts and all publications. #e strict authority of Glavlit covered not only the USSR but also all 
Soviet occupied countries. Censorship in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics remains the 
longest lasting and most comprehensive censorship in the 20th century. 
An institution of censorship and centralization inevitably inﬂuenced the whole translation 
process in the Soviet Union. Principles and methods of Soviet translators were much more 
uniﬁed than in democratic societies. All participants in the translation process (translators, 
censors, publishers) existed as one united group which had strongly determined aims. #e Soviet 
publishing world was closed, centralized and bureaucratically controlled. On the other hand, we 
ﬁnd intense eﬀorts made by translators to preserve and even expand the horizons of the readers, 
to maintain a minimal cultural level, and circumvent censorship.
#is paper focuses on translation strategies used by Soviet translators who were forced to work 
under strong ideological inﬂuence and on the relationships between diﬀerent methods existed 
in the Soviet translation school.   

#e following list of Western authors which were among the ﬁrst to be allowed for translation 
during the Stalinist period and had been republished during the whole period of the Soviet State 
characterizes the main direction of foreign literature policy. 
English literature was represented mainly by classics written by Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, 
Henry Fielding, John Galsworthy, William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, and William Makepeace 
#ackeray. Among newer authors only James Aldridge could be found. #ere were just a few 
“safe” classics among American writers, including James Fennimore Cooper, Henry Wadsworth 
Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe. #eodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair were also allowed because 
of their criticism of the capitalist system. Among French authors considered to be “appropriate” 
may be found Honoré de Balzac, Gustav Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, Prosper 
Mérimée, Romain Rolland, Stendhal, and André Still. #e works of Voltaire and Diderot were 
also allowed because of their anti-religious nature. During the Stalinist period German literature 
was practically unpublished, except for Heinrich Heine. Spanish literature was represented for a 
long time only by Cervantes. Obviously, the horizon of the reader was not allowed to rise beyond 
the nineteenth century. Isolation from the real twentieth century literary process was hermetic.  
 
According to Ermolaev (1997), some authors were put on the black list very quickly and 
almost never appeared in the oﬃcial literature: 
-    almost all Czech and Slovak literature 
-  Russian dissidents and émigrés: Andrei Belyi, Mikhail Bulgakov, Nikolai Gumilev (executed 
in 1921), Viacheslav Ivanov, Vladislav Khodasevich, Nikolai Kliuev, Vladimir Nabokov 
and Evgenii Zamiatin; from later authors three winners of Nobel prize in literature: Ivan 
Bunin (emigrated in 1917, received the Nobel prize in 1933), Aleksander Solzhenitsyn 
(deported from the Soviet Union in 1974, received the Nobel prize in 1970) and Joseph 
Brodsky (expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972, received the Nobel prize in 1987);
-  Western authors of anti-Communist books, including Aldous Huxley, André Gide, 
André Breton, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell, André Malraux, John Dos Passos 
and Ignazio Silone; 
-  Catholics: Georges Bernanos, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Paul Claudel and Oscar Milosz, 
or mystics: Gustav Meyrink;
-  writers who were aﬃliated with the movement of the extreme right, regardless of the 
degree or nature of their involvement: Hans Carossa, Louis Céline, Ernst Junger, 
Giovanni Papini as well as Gottfried Benn, and Ezra Pound. 
-  so-called “pornographic” writers, such as D. H. Lawrence, Georges Bataille, and Henry 
Miller.
Modernists who had the reputation of “reactionaries” or nihilists were sometimes published 
with special comments. T o this group belong Beckett, Borges, Broch, Eliot, Joyce, Kafka, Musil, 
Proust, Italo Svevo, Virginia Woolf, and the representatives of the French “new novel”, Michel 
Butor and Alain Robbe-Grillet. 
For instance, George Orwell’s most famous novel Animal Farm was published after long debates 
in the Soviet Committee for foreign literature only in 1989 but appeared without indication of 
the number of copies and the name of the translator with the following preface: 
[...] the novels Animal Farm and 1984 have brought fame to George Orwell. #ese books 
are a satire on Soviet society. #is is why it is not accidental that 1984 has been turned into 
an instrument of anti-Soviet propaganda by bourgeois statesmen, economists, philosophers 
and journalists. #e book has been widely publicized in the West and bourgeois authors 
often refer to, or cite from 1984 when writing about the Soviet Union and other socialist 
countries. (1989, 10)
In oﬃcial literature the name of George Orwell
4
 was never mentioned until the fall of the Soviet 
Union. #e only short reference appeared in the Concise Literary Encyclopaedia: “Bourgeois 
critics praise Orwell for the anti-communist and modernist trends in his works”.
As for non-ﬁction, and especially the humanities and social sciences, hardly anything 
of importance was translated. Many foreign books and journals were conﬁned to closed 
repositories called spetskhran − often called the Gulag for books – and accessible only to those 
inside the Academy of Sciences system or even more restricted party circles. 
 Soviet translators primarily used the domesticated method
5
 which prevailed after a short struggle 
with the “formal” method, advocated by the Russian formalist school
6
. A domesticated translation 
ideal had been resorted to as a means of protecting and developing the national language and 
identity and representing a certain picture of foreign culture which was important for ideological 
purposes. 
#e orientation on domesticated translations had a number of reasons dependant on the special 
status of foreign literature in the Soviet Union. First, the ultimate problem of Soviet translators 
became the low background knowledge of “mass” readers for whom they had to translate. Literary 
culture in Russia before the revolution was extremely highly developed. #e most talented and 
famous Russian authors translated foreign writers. After the revolution, the Communists saw 
themselves creating not just a new society, but a new kind of society, one in which the masses 
would participate in every aspect. One of the prevailing ideological purposes of literature in the 
Soviet Union was to popularize literature and to make it comprehensible for the less educated 
levels of society. It was proclaimed at the ﬁrst Congress of Writers in 1934 that literary work in 
the Land of Soviets had become the aﬀair of all the toilers, “matter of mass consumption”. Maxim 
 
Gorky deﬁned the place and the signiﬁcance of Soviet literature, explaining which ideological 
and stylistic peculiarities distinguished it from the literature of the bourgeoisie. #e literary work 
should bear some peculiar signs of progressiveness, such as the themes of labor, struggle for 
justice, protest against bourgeois society, pity for suﬀering, depiction of poor people, and social 
and class struggle
7
. One of the main aims of a new literary program became to make native and 
foreign literature acceptable for every single reader. Such engagement was supposed to raise the 
cultural level of the masses. Considering these new obligations, foreignized strategies focused 
not simply on “understanding” but on widening of comprehension borders became completely 
incoherent. 
Secondly, Soviet translators wanted to protect and develop their native language, to preserve the 
magniﬁcent and powerful Russian of the nineteenth century. #eir desire was easily understood. 
From the very beginning, the Soviet period was characterized by linguistic instability and change 
which included the abolition of concepts and words from “old social structures”. As a result, the 
activization of new linguistic forms and word-formations permeated all spheres of social, cultural 
and political life (Roesen and Lunde 2006, 10). 
#e linguistic situation in the Soviet Union was characterized by the fact that to describe new 
levels of life a new vocabulary had to be invented. #e ﬁrst Soviet decade of Russia was turbulent, 
and rapid changes in the political and cultural life were accompanied by dramatic shifts in 
language culture. At that time Russia experienced a strong inﬂux of ideologically charged words. 
Bolshevik revolutionaries endeavored to replace traditional language structures with a cacophony 
of new words, phrases, and communicative contexts intended to deﬁne and help legitimatize the 
new Soviet order (Gorham 2003, 67).
#e vocabulary of the Russian language changed, in the sense that it had been replenished with a 
considerable number of new words, expressions, abbreviations, derivatives, even personal names
8
. 
A number of words and expressions changed their meaning and acquired a new signiﬁcation. A 
number of obsolete words dropped out of the vocabulary.
#e proponents of Socialist Realism accused avant-garde
9
 artists of valuing style more than 
content. Hence, the battle over linguistics loomed as part of the class struggle for the direction of 
culture. Was Soviet linguistics to be bourgeois formalism, or proletarian realism? By 1934, that 
question had become, literally, a matter of life and death.
#e task to protect and preserve literary Russian language gained a special importance in the 
situation of actually replacing the Russian language with some new “proletarian” language.

Foreignized translation was strongly criticized by Soviet theorists, who proclaimed it to be 
“slavery copying” which destroyed the target language and could not transform the meaning 
(Levickaia and Fiterman 1963, 12). However, foreignized elements were not completely avoided 
in translations. A further signiﬁcant aim of the Soviet translation school was proclaimed to be 
the enlightening of “mass” readers for educational purposes. Foreignized translation could give 
the reader more information than a domesticated one. For that reason, literary translations made 
in the Soviet Union were equipped with numerous comments, prefaces, footnotes, explanations, 
etc. Again, this care about the reader’s education was colored entirely by ideology. 
On the proposal of Lunacharskii (a member of the Bolshevik government, responsible for 
literature and culture), each literary work written by a foreign author and published in the Soviet 
Union had to contain a special preface. #e main task of these prefaces was to reveal the “correct” 
meaning of the work to Soviet readers who were completely unfamiliar with the real political and 
cultural situation in foreign countries. #us, in the preface to Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist it was 
written that Oliver was a symbol of capitalist England, which overﬂowed with poverty, corruption 
and criminals, and that a frightening number of English children lived in such conditions. Such 
“explanations” should be considered as a part of ideological pressure. 
Comments and footnotes were also intended to “enlighten” Soviet readers. Comments were 
aimed to explain purely ideological features. #us, in the comment to Robert Burns’ poem “My 
heart’s in the Highlands” which described the beauty of the Scottish landscape, it was mentioned 
that in the eighteenth century many protestors against the English government hid in the hills. 
Such comment insinuated that this poem was devoted to the Scottish rebels. 
In the comment to Dickens’ novel !e Pickwick Papers it was written that the courts in England 
were intended only to serve the prevailing social classes and skillfully used a complete absence 
of laws in England. #e same comment contained more than one full page explanation of the 
corrupt court system in England which protected only the interests of capitalists. 
As for footnotes, they usually contained useful information, such as historical facts, events, dates 
and cultural traditions. Soviet readers could not help feeling a certain interest and probably 
nostalgia for the unknown world of foreign culture. #is traditional interest was intensiﬁed in 
the Soviet period because foreign cultures remained almost inaccessible. T raveling abroad was 
very restricted and the behavior of Soviet citizens while in foreign countries was controlled.
10
 Any 
publications from abroad were forbidden for private persons. Each attempt to bring in foreign 
literature was suppressed by the customs. 
For Soviet readers, who were forced to live more then seventy years behind the iron curtain, 
literary translations represented the only “window” into the foreign world. #ey wanted to 
explore the foreign world, to understand exotic elements, national coloration, characters and 
atmosphere, but this desire was only partly satisﬁed.

#us, the high standards of translations and ideological connotations demanded were combined 
with almost complete absence of information. Rait-Kovaleva (1965, 203−5), a famous Soviet 
translator, wrote that literary characters did not exist in a vacuum. #e historical time and 
the place inﬂuenced the choice of means of translation. #erefore, the translator had to know 
at least something about foreign cultures. In the Soviet Union translators did not have an 
opportunity to access the necessary sources of information about foreign cultures and had to 
consider ideological demands. In the process of constant ideological adaptations characteristic 
of hermetic Soviet culture, a special virtual reality of foreign countries was shaped which 
remained unchanged for many years. Belov (1989, 177), a well-known Soviet critic and 
translator, wrote that he had translated American literature for more than twenty years but 
sometimes he thought that America did not exist at all, that it was just a myth As a result of 
this paradoxical situation, despite the information contained in footnotes, Soviet readers were 
provided with adapted images of other countries which in most cases were far from reality.  
 It is true that in Soviet Russia, an unusually high number of gifted translators faced harsh 
censorship. Oﬃcial ideological predilections bracketed out whole areas of literature; even in 
ﬁction, everything that did not ﬁt the oﬃcial canon was banned or severely limited. Another 
problem was that while there were certainly many talented and even well-trained translators, 
they could not study abroad and had very limited access to informational sources required 
for successful translations. Many of the skills and habits needed were inaccessible to them.
#e choice of domesticated method did not depend on personal tastes or current tendencies 
but primarily on the speciﬁc ideological environment in which Soviet translators had to work. 
#us, the main consequence of the prevailing domesticated method of translation is that 
works of Soviet translators can be appreciated primarily for their literary qualities rather than 
their faithfulness to the original. 
Henceforth, the main slogan of Soviet translators, “Good translation in good Russian,” meant 
that in this case, Soviet translations became almost the only source of pure literary language 
for Russian readers. Soviet translators resisted the uniﬁcation and simplicity of language sated 
with artiﬁcial, awkward linguistic formations ﬂourishing in Soviet literature and preserved the 
literary Russian language for the next generations. 
#ey also enabled Soviet readers to have at a least momentary look at distant cultures. Despite 
ideological adaptations, translations were almost the only source of information about 
foreign lands. Even considering the fact that literary translations were strongly inﬂuenced by 
leading ideology, the privilege of reading translated literature opened a completely diﬀerent 
perspective for those who had access to such periodicals as Foreign Literature. #e meaning of 
such magazines was enormous. 
However, the fact is that during the Soviet period, when the high prestige of literature was 
almost the only source of spiritual freedom, signiﬁcantly successful translations appeared. 
Many of them are still republished in modern Russia because, unfortunately, irrespective of 
an absolute literary freedom, the overwhelming majority of translations in Russia today are of 
execrable quality. 
 − ’ – “ ” − − ’ − ’