An Outline History of Ukrainian Interpreting and Interpreting Studies Through the Prism of Pseudocoloniality

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.46991/TSTP/2026.SI.3.074

Keywords:

interpreting history, Soviet Ukraine, pseudocoloniality, interpreter invisibility, military interpreting, community interpreting, cinema interpreting, interpreter training

Abstract

This paper examines the history of interpreting in Soviet Ukraine through the analytical lens of pseudocoloniality, focusing on the invisibility of Ukrainian interpreters and the subordination of Ukrainian as a working language. The research employs historiographic sources, memoirs, archival materials, and original interviews with former practitioners to reconstruct interpreting practices across a wide range of institutional and social contexts, including diplomacy, courts, military service, tourism, cinema, community settings, and sites of repression. Attention is also paid to the ways in which interpreting functioned not only as linguistic mediation but also as an instrument of ideological control, surveillance, and assimilation. The analysis demonstrates that interpreting in the Ukrainian SSR was rarely recognized as an autonomous profession; instead, it was frequently embedded in other roles and governed by centralized language policy that privileged Russian. The article addresses a significant gap in interpreting historiography and argues for the necessity of integrating postcolonial and pseudocolonial perspectives into the study of interpreting in imperial and post-imperial contexts.

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Author Biographies

  • Taras Shmiher, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv

    Doctor Habilitatus and Professor at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine. He is a laureate of the Hryhoriy Kochur Literary Prize and a full member of the Shevchenko Scholarly Society (both 2015). He was also a Fulbright scholar at the University of California, Berkeley (USA), a visiting researcher at Prešov University, at the Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice and the Institute of Slovak Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (all in Slovakia), the Technical University of Chemnitz (Germany), Hong Kong Baptist University (SAR Hong Kong, China) and a research fellow at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin (Poland). His main research interests include translation studies, medieval literature, liturgical translation, reception, and perception, among other areas. He researches and publishes on the history and theory of translation (especially liturgical translation), translation quality assessment, and early Ukrainian and British texts.

  • Oleksandra Litvinyak, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv

    PhD, Associate Professor of Translation/Interpreting Studies, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine, and a conference interpreter, member of the Ukrainian Association of Translators and Interpreters (UATI). She is the course leader of the Master’s programme in “Interpreting of Two Foreign Languages” at the Hryhoriy Kochur Department of Translation/Interpreting Studies and Contrastive Linguistics, IFNUL. She is also the director of the Center for English-language Academic and Cross-Cultural Communication. Her research interests lie within the field of Interpreting Studies, including methods and approaches to interpreter and translator training.

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Published

2026-09-25

Issue

Re-thinking Soviet Translation Studies

Section

Part I: Re-thinking Translation History from the Periphery

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Taras Shmiher, Oleksandra Litvinyak

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Shmiher, Taras, and Oleksandra Litvinyak. 2026. “An Outline History of Ukrainian Interpreting and Interpreting Studies Through the Prism of Pseudocoloniality”. Translation Studies: Theory and Practice 3 (September): 74-89. https://doi.org/10.46991/TSTP/2026.SI.3.074.