Military translators and interpreters in the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) as the founders of modern Russian philology and translation studies

Abstract

The article deals with the military translators’ and interpreters’ activities on the Great Patriotic War fronts. They were about 5 thousand heroes altogether: namely professional military translators and interpreters, retrained students from humanities universities and ordinary servicemen who knew the enemy’s language tolerably well. After the end of the Great Patriotic War, some of them continued their professional work in the field of humanities, creating a solid foundation for domestic philological arts in the fields of literary criticism, linguistics, translation theory and methodology. Special attention is paid to the creative work of former military translators and interpreters who laid the foundations for the Linguistic Theory of Translation. The impetus for its creation was largely provided by the practical knowledge, skills and abilities obtained in the crucible of war: POW interrogation, systematization and translation of captured documents written in particular in a special Gothic font and military terminological and phraseological dictionaries correction and supplementation as well as cartography, warfare propaganda at enemy forces, etc. In the following decades, Russian scholars A.V. Fyodorov, Ya.I. Retsker, A.D. Schweitzer, V.N. Komissarov, S.G. Barkhudarov and others created a well-structured system of the abovementioned Linguistic Theory of Translation (LTT) which also became widespread abroad. Despite the emergence of numerous modern translation theories, contrasting in essence with LTT, the basic theoretical and pragmatic principles of the latter remain relevant and are actively used in modern training programs for translators and interpreters. Today’s military translators and interpreters proudly carry on the military traditions of their fathers and grandfathers, and they will undoubtedly make their significant theoretical, methodological and pragmatic contribution to the annals of Russian translation studies.