Andrei Fedorov’s theory of translation and its place in the history of translation studies

Translation theory developed in the Soviet Union in the early and mid-20th century, including the work of Russian translator and scholar Andrei Fedorov (1906-1997), has been understudied in Anglophone literature. Despite the growing academic interest demonstrated in recent works, including Mossop (2019 [2013]), Pym (2016) and Schippel (2017), the scholarship on Fedorov’s work remains limited, partly due to the lack of translated primary sources. Only in 2021 was Fedorov’s major work on translation theory published in English translation (Baer, 2021b).
This thesis belongs to the fields of translation history and historiography of translation theories/studies and relies on the theoretical framework of descriptive translation studies. It investigates the figure and work of Fedorov and ultimately seeks to reclaim Fedorov’s place in the history of the discipline. The thesis asks what Fedorov’s contribution to translation theory was and how far it has remained relevant. Close reading and critical analysis of primary sources and historical secondary sources have been used to study the metalanguage of Fedorov’s theory and to identify changes made on the way to its publication, revealing the development of his ideas and interference of external factors. The sources included unpublished manuscripts, stored in the Central State Archives of Literature and Art in Saint Petersburg, Russia, which had not been previously investigated. An original analysis of Fedorov’s correspondence was used to answer another research question pertaining to Fedorov’s contacts in other countries and demonstrated his links to scholars outside the USSR. A bibliography of Fedorov’s publications was compiled to provide the corpus for a scientometric analysis which showed a significant impact of his works. These findings led to the conclusion that Fedorov’s ideas remain relevant today, primarily from the historical perspective of his pioneering role in the development of translation studies as a discipline and its conceptual framework.