Michael Gordin (Princeton): The Russians are Writing! The Cold War Crisis of Scientific Language

Lecture: Michael Gordin: The Russians are Writing! The Cold War Crisis of Scientific Language.

Date: 21. Januar 2016, 18:00-20:00

Venue:: Liebig-Museum, Liebigstraße 12, Gießen

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).