Where is the real Halder? (Inaccuracies in the translation of the “War Diary” of the chief of staff of the German army general staff)

Abstract

The article by Yury Mikhailovich Lebedev, military historian and translator, member of Writers Union of Russian Federation allows the reader to see the work of a translator through the eyes of a translator. The author draws attention to the importance of thorough historical and linguistic analysis, which must precede the translation, especially in the choice of lexical correspondences, especially in cases where the desired word affects not only the context, but also the meaning of the text as a whole. The author researches are based on fragments from the third volume of the “War Diary”, 1938–1942. These are the English translations (USA, late 1940s) and the Russian translations (USSR, late 1960s). The author chooses for the comparative analysis those fragments of the original text, which contain information about the Wehrmacht’s plans concerning the fate of Leningrad. The history of the blockade and the heroic defense of Leningrad is still the subject of fierce debate. An important argument in such discussions are historical documents, including Halder’s diary, which contains a huge amount of factual material about the plans and actions of the Wehrmacht in 1939–1942. The reliability of foreignlanguage sources depends to a large extent on minimizing inaccuracies in their translations. The author conducts a comparative analysis of existing translations, subjecting them to verification by means of scrupulous semantic and historical parsing, and proposes his own solutions. The author’s work clearly demonstrates how translation choices affect the perspective of historical facts.

The article is based on the materials of the book by Yu. M. Lebedev “Leningrad ‘Blitzkrieg’ ” (Lebedev 2011).