Scholarly Introduction (to the English translation of Finkel's paper "On autotranslation" )
What is it about?
This is a scholarly introduction to the English translation of the Russian article “Ob avtoperevo”[On Autotranslation ] (1962) by the Ukrainian linguist and translation studies scholar Oleksandr Finkel (1899 –1968) ,considered by many to be the first discussion of self-translation .This is not entirely the case, however, as Finkel, the author of the first book-length study of translation theory in the then Soviet Union, The Theory and Practice of Translation (published in Ukrainian in 1929), had directed his attention to the problem of self-translation as early as 1929 in the article “H.F. Kvitka as the Translator of His Own Works,” written in Ukrainian and printed in a scholarly collection to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Kharkiv-based Ukrainian author Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovyanenko. Finkel turned his attention to the problem of self-translation repeatedly throughout his life. The paper discusses other Finkel's works dealing with self-translation.