Datum/Date: 21. Januar 2015,
18:00-20:00
Veranstaltungsort/Venua: Liebig Museum, Liebigstraße 12, Gießen
Veranstalter / Organizers: The International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture in
cooperation with Herder-Institute for Historical Research on Eastern Europe –
Institute of Leibniz Association, Marburg
In the history of
scientific languages - that is, those languages in which the vast majority of
scientific communication is expressed – the early Cold War constituted a major
transitional moment. The century-long reign of three dominant languages
(English, French, and German) was destabilized by geopolitical transformations
in the wake of both World Wars. Consequently, the second most dominant
scientific language, with a percentage of global publication equal to German
and French combined, was Russian, a language the Western European and North
American scientific community had persistently marginalized.
This talk explores the
efforts of principally American scientists and policy-makers to confront the
enormous linguistic challenge of scientific Russian. After two approaches
-teaching Russian to scientists and then the early years of Machine Translation
(MT) - foundered in the early 1960s, the stopgap measure of cover-to-cover
translation journals took over, and remained the main strategy for scientists
outside the Communist Bloc (in the Americas, Europe, and South and East Asia)
to engage with the tremendous scientific infrastructure of the Soviet Union.
The contingent history of these developments, as this talk argues, set the
stage for today’s overwhelming dominance of a single vehicular language for
scientific communication: English.
Lecture attendees are also
invited to arrive earlier the Liebig-Museum in order to enjoy a guided tour two
hours before the lecture or to view the permanent exhibitions from one hour
prior to the lecture. Discussions with Prof. Gordin can be continued over
dinner at the nearby restaurant Justus im Hessischen Hof.
The event is organized in
cooperation with The International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture and
is accompanied by a Studientag in Frankfurt/ Main on Cold War Science “Science
that Came in from the Cold: Epistemology, Rationality and Cold War Scientific
Culture”.
For more information about the latter event please contact Jan Surman
(jan.surman@herder-institut.de).
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