A Multitude of Languages - and One Country: Building up Communication among the Peoples of Russia through Translation

The article gives a survey of the problematics, historic and cultural practice of maintaining and developing the ethnic languages of Russia through translation; it retrospectively describes the history of polycultural co-existence (including the unified method of presentation for children’s folk lore in S. Marshak’s version) and outlines the ways of dealing with today’s urgent problems of preserving ethnic language. The article describes the models of reconstructing the lost texts and the strategies of translating the texts of small ethnic groups, as well as the models of maintaining the quality of translation from Russia’s ethnic languages into Russian. We especially stress the importance of the Russian language in its role of the cultural mediator. The article pays due attention to the need to develop specific practiceoriented theories of translation which would embrace the global experience in translatology and take into account the specificity of ethno-centric mentality and the ways to keep it in translation. The article is an introduction to the following materials in the volume.