The International Newsletter of Communist Studies Online IX

The International Newsletter of Communist Studies Online 16/2003 8
alphabet Russian names into Latin-alphabet English. Thus a non-Russian name originally
spelled with a non-Cyrillic alphabet, say Hungarian for example, had been translated into
Russian and affixed to a Comintern file now located at RGASPI. The Russian name on the file
is now being translated into English. The inherent problems of this double translation is
compounded in that in English phonetically identical names can often be spelled with
different combinations of letters with equal linguistic accuracy. Consequently when linguists
translated these names from Russian into English, while most were entirely accurate, a
portion will inevitably not be spelled correctly compared to the original non-Russian spelling.
This will cause problems for someone searching under one spelling and not realizing that it
may be in the database under a variant spelling.
The problem cannot be eliminated entirely. To go back into the files to verify the native
language spelling of more than one-hundred thousand names was not a practical possibility.
INCOMKA sought to reduce the extent of the problem by sending the translations prepared
by Library of Congress linguists to scholars who know the Comintern and the national parties
and can match the translations with their knowledge of names of real persons.
The American personal files for example
The American personal file list illustrates the nature of the problem and the usefulness of
having the translations reviewed by subject area scholars. The Comintern maintained
personal files on more than 6,800 Americans. One of the files has the name, in Russian, of
»_______, E___.« The linguist working on the list rendered that into »Brauder, Earl«. When
historians reviewed the translation, they recognized this as a translation garble for »Browder,
Earl«, the man who headed the Communist Party, USA from the early 1930s to 1945. This was
not a linguistic error on the part of the translator: »Brauder« and »Browder« are phonetic
equivalents in English. Rather, the translator simply picked a variation in English spelling that
was not the one Earl Browder actually used. Similarly, the translator rendered the Russian
»B_________, __’____« as »Vagenknekht, Alfred«. Historians recognized that as a leading