Post-Soviet academic disciplines were rebuilt through donor-funded translation projects

Evidence

The OSI’s Translation Project … started around 1994 with the aim to make available in the local languages of Eastern Europe at least the minimum of basic texts in the social sciences needed to renew higher education and to sustain informed public discussion of social and political issues. The first grant competitions were held in 1995 in Romania and Bulgaria, quickly followed by other countries in the years that followed. OSI has spent approximately $5,000,000 for nearly 2,000 editions. The list of recommended titles … was intended as a point of reference to publishers, but they could also offer other titles in the humanities … Grants covered from 30 per cent to 80 per cent of the total publishing costs depending on the country. The impact of the project has varied from country to country as the number of titles published varies a lot and it was not very well managed everywhere. But I can say with full confidence that the project has had an enormous effect on the way that the humanities and social sciences have been, and are now being taught in the region. For example, translations supported by the project form 40 per cent of all titles on the reading lists of eleven disciplines in major universities in Bulgaria and the Ukraine — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 809

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Foundations module theme of how Western knowledge production is transmitted into postcolonial/post-Communist contexts — parallels how Orientalism’s concepts traveled into Arabic and Turkish academies; a mechanism of canon-building the Islamophobia readings will assume. — connects to: Translations adapt theoretical texts to local literary canons — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 790; Rastafarians remade themselves by appropriating and transforming borrowed cultural materials

Broader Connections

• Translations adapt theoretical texts to local literary canons #expands (0.75) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 790
• Rastafarians remade themselves by appropriating and transforming borrowed cultural materials #complicates (0.70)