Linguistic theory of translation in Russia: Major approaches and concepts

The first works in which the phenomenon of translation was described in scientific terms started to appear in the first part of the 20th century. Although the translation was dealt with as “a phenomenon” in these works, the translation itself was described as “an art” and a translator as “a gifted person”. The Second World War and a new post-war world order changed the direction of translation studies in Russia. The need for the professional translators ensuring effective communication and capable of working in various areas such as military, political, diplomatic, humanitarian arose after the War in order to maintain international relations of a new quality. Specialists with experience in translation gained during and after the War were entrusted with a task of developing translation studies. These researchers known first of all as translators followed the trends in linguistics and developed the approaches toward the translation within the linguistics. Thus there are various theoretical trends based on structural, functional, semantic and semiotic approaches toward the translation in the framework of translation theory in Russia. This article introduces the approaches and concepts developed by the Russian School of translation since 1950’s in the works of Y. Retsker, V. Gak, A. Shveitser, A. Barhudarov, R. Minyar-Beloruchev, V. Komissarov. New facts about A. Fedorov’s approach that is quoted in some works in Turkey were given within the scope of this work. Due to the page limit in this article theory was highlighted and a few examples from the Russian-Turkish language pair were provided to explain some of the concepts