Dmitrieva, E. and Cherkashina, M., eds. (2025). Multilingualism and back-translation. Moscow: IMLI RAN. (In Russ.)

Abstract

The review discusses a co-authored monograph by scholars from the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the RAS. The book is concerned with the problems of cultural transfer, multilingualism, back-translation, inversions of meaning, and the common space of world culture and history. The monograph offers compelling arguments in favour of combining the methods of historical and comparative studies of literature, hermeneutics and pragmatics, the use of back-translation of a text into the language of its native historical period, and an unbiased assessment from the modern view-point. Each of the articles offers plenty of opportunity to learn, if only from its imperfections. With the example of M. Cherkashina’s study, the reviewer suggests that the discussion of the relevance of back-translation would be more meaningful if, instead of the frequently analyzed S. Marshak translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the scholar had considered the latest collection of the Bard’s sonnets prepared by I. Shaytanov (2022). This publication features an innovative structure and approach, resulting in a practical synthesis of the ideas of back-translation and cultural transfer.