Shaping a sociocultural attitude through multilingual intercultural communication
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Foreign language learning significantly promotes the learner's intercultural communication. His/her intercultural skills expanded in this way become an important instrument in shaping his/her socio-cultural world view. The foreign language skills to be acquired enable unmediated access to information from original sources in a foreign language. In this way, the recipient safeguards his/her consciousness against the influence of arbitrary manipulation of information during its translation. In this article the author compares several passages from the original work by the worldfamous British publicist Alexander Werth “Russia at War 1941–1945” with the Russian (1967) and the German (1965) translation. Using the example of numerous comparisons, the author concludes that the exclusion of parts of sentences, full sentences and paragraphs with heavy content severely impairs the content of the Russian-language translation and undermines the expressiveness of the original. The use of almost synonymous but meaning-distorting individual words also fulfills the same negative function. The exclusions and distortions in the translated text considered in the article concern historical and political realities, events, politicians, generals as well as ordinary people. The author of the article explains the exclusions and distortions noted as the ideologically and politically motivated efforts of the Soviet-Russian editors of the translation to whitewash the most sensitive episodes of Soviet-Russian history, camouflaging themselves with the recognized reputation of Alexander Werth. Despite the proclaimed efforts of the Soviet-Russian editors of the translation not to compromise the original content, the translation has deliberately compromised the meaning. The author of the article considers the topic to be relevant because unaltered reprints appear repeatedly in today's Russia and significantly distort readers' opinions. Moreover, this translation and its reprints are often used as a source for scientific research, which hardly contributes to the academic integrity of this research. Therefore, the author considers it important to educate foreign language learners that their acquired foreign language knowledge and skills can positively contribute to their socio-cultural and academic integrity.
Source: Germanistik in der ukraine
Author: Volodymyr Kovtun
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4411905629