Moscow University Translation Studies Bulletin. 2020. 2.

The 75th anniversary of the Soviet people’s victory in the Great Patriotic War once again brings us back to the events of that time and makes us think again about the impact of the war not only on various aspects of human society, the economy, politics and technology, but also on the human consciousness, man’s language and speech activity.

During any war, the cognitive and communicative system that provides communication in the military sphere is being refined and developed. Inter-language communication and translation take on peculiar forms in the context of a military confrontation between “us” and “them.”

The Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War expanded the range of social functions of the Russian language. It became the language of international cooperation, including that in the military sphere, which gave a major boost to translation activities, as well as the development of translation theory and methodology.

The article describes the uncompromising verbal struggle against Nazism that simultaneous interpreters waged at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial (1945–46) regardless of considerable emotional strain and the psychological pressure exerted on them by some defendants and the counsel every so often. The interpreters defied the odds and emerged victorious. Excerpts from the memoirs authored by some of the key participants in the Trial of Six Million Words are provided.

The paper deals with the study of the military-political discourse (MPD) as a state-institutional, hybrid-multivector communicative phenomenon of a functionally multi-purpose mission — military doctrinal, political-diplomatic, military-journalistic (informational and propaganda), military-commercial, military-educational, etc. It states an unprecedented use on the international arena by representatives of power structures of a number of NATO member countries in the media and oral rhetoric of discursive games of a substandard style with the goal of insulting, humiliating and ridiculing an opponent-recipient at the level of a deviant-profane usus using an invective, obscene vocabulary, offensive paralinguistic means, etc. The author analyzes the professional activities of the translator in the field of military-political communication as a civil servant in the Armed Forces sector on the scale of the pan-European standard for working languages with the index C₁ / C₂ using the example of inter-lingual mediation in the field of military journalism.

The article describes various aspects of military interpreters’ work during the Great Patriotic War. The author shows the specifics of speech in a military environment and the conditionality of speech behavior of a military personnel as determined by the nature of combat tasks that they perform.

The article reveals the types of activities of any military interpreter depending on the features of the military organization of units and formations, as well as the uniqueness of the conditions in which the military personnel operate.

The author emphasizes the need for special language training and stresses the role of the Military Institute of Foreign Languages (MIFL) in the training of military interpreters during the war. It would have been impossible to start fighting without translators who not only spoke the enemy’s language, but also knew its military machine, who were able to navigate freely in captured documents, gain information from radio traffic and influence the enemy’s troops and population. The successful preparation and conduct of operations ultimately depended on those officers’ language skills.

Ryurik Konstantinovich Minyar-Beloruchev (1922–2000) was one of the most famous Soviet and Russian scholars and of the founders of the general theory of translation. He laid the theoretical basis for interpretation and devised methods of teaching consecutive and simultaneous interpretation. His numerous works, based on his rich personal experience, research, teaching and experimental work, have become a model to follow in the field of interpretation studies and practical training of interpreters.

Due to the high demand for interpretation in the modern world, MinyarBeloruchev’s works deserve a close study not only by Russian interpretation researchers and educators, but also by experts from other countries. Currently, research into the interpretation theory in China is still at the initial stage of its development, and the need for highly qualified interpreters in China is constantly growing. Chinese researchers should study the theory developed by Ryurik K. Minyar-Beloruchev when setting up training programs for interpreters in China.