The Shughnani translation of Lev Kassil’s story “Cold Ice Floe”

This article presents the translation of Soviet author Lev Kassil’s story “Cold Ice Floe” (Льдина холодина) into the Shughnani language. The text of the translation was written using the alphabet designed for Shughnani in the early 20th century during the Soviet campaign for developing writing systems, eliminating illiteracy, and introducing education in native languages, a broad initiative that saw the publication of primers, textbooks and translated literature in many of the minority languages of the USSR. Included in this literacy cam‑ paign were Shughnani translations of the Russian translation of Wilhelm Hauff’s fairy tale “Die Geschichte von dem kleinen Muck“ (also known as “Little Muck“) and Lev Kassil’s “Cold Ice Floe”. The Shughnani translation of “Cold Ice Floe”, published in 1938, is presented here in the following format: first, the Shughnani text according to the 1938 edition; the phonological transcription of the text written down using the currently accepted Iranian transcription system based on the Romanised alphabet with additional symbols accompanied with a line of morphemic notation; a free back-transla‑ tion into Russian. This format makes it possible to use the Shughnani text and its Russian back-translation for comparative studies in linguistics and literary criticism. This translation is one of the first examples of written fiction in the Shughnani language. The relevance of studying translated texts and bilingual books is found in their unique linguistic characteristics, as well as in the lack of research on such texts in languages with a recently created writing system or that do not yet have an official wri‑ ting system in Russia and its neighboring countries, with the Shugh‑ nani language as a case in point.