The International Newsletter of Communist Studies Online IX

The International Newsletter of Communist Studies Online 16/2003 7
accurate translation of some Comintern organizational titles and operational »jargon»
required consultation with historians familiar with Comintern history. However, Library of
Congress linguists quickly found that translation of more than 170,000 personal names that
occurred in the database was a more difficult task.
These personal names occurred in descriptions of files of various Comintern secretariats and
agencies. The greatest number, however, came with more than 100,000 personal files
maintained by the Comintern, the so called cadre files. These files are background files for
persons for whom for one reason or another the Comintern at some point set up a
biographical file. Many are for Comintern personnel, students at Comintern schools, and
senior members of foreign parties. However, many files were also established for persons
who were prominent opponents of the Communist movement. For example, the Comintern
maintained a biographical file on J. Edgar Hoover, a strong anti-communist who headed the
USA’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Comintern established files on thousands of
persons who were simply of political importance such as major political or governmental
figures, journalists, diplomats, trade union officials or others who were of interest to the
Communist International for whatever.
Methodological problems of translation
While the Library of Congress made the initial translation of most national personal file lists,
the Archives of France, the Federal Archives of Germany, and the Federal Archives of
Switzerland undertook the initial translation of their respective national lists. In those cases,
the Library of Congress provided only a computer transliteration from Russian to the Library
of Congress phonetic Cyrillic to Latin alphabet transliteration system.
Here is the translation problem. The Comintern labeled its personal files in Russian: all
English, French, Spanish, Japanese, German, Finnish and other language names were
transliterated into Russian by Comintern files clerks with varying linguistic ability and with
differing transliterating habits. Linguists now faced the task of translating these Cyrillic-