Linguistic and cultural discrepancy, or Sui Mei Travels about the Soviet Union

Abstract

Soviet textbooks of foreign languages, in particular English, very accurately reflect those tendencies which affected the evolution of the approach to teaching and its goals, from exchanging information to unidirectional (“addresseeless”) communication that was thematically limited by the realities of a closed society. The material of textbooks changed from original works slightly colored ideologically in the late-1920s towards texts that were completely removed from the realities of countries of the studied languages in the 1930s — 80s. The practice based on “word-for-word translation” methodology resulted in (a) entire lexical spheres having no equivalents in the English-speaking world (e. g. The Moscow News lexicon), (b) incorrect designations of borrowed notions (“currency exchange office” instead of Foreign Exchange), and (c) “reification,” creating notions based on reinterpreted borrowings. All this is fundamentally different from borrowing words together with respective notions under natural conditions (e. g. in émigré communities). Later on, the method of direct borrowing began to be used in Russia and as a result, a significant layer of neologisms was formed in the vocabulary of the modern Russian language. A large portion of the neologisms had equivalents (some of them previously borrowed) and this resulted in a new synonymy with further ousting of one of the synonyms (e. g. tendencija → trend, specialist → ekspert, etc.), or a division of meanings, including even the formation of words in their own right (messač’< message), etc. An alternative to this tendency can be a conscious attitude to language processes (native speakers’ control of borrowings), which in turn, depend on competence in both contacting languages and, in the last analysis, the organization of education in the country.