New Holland back-translated, or cultural mediation in reverse: Englishing early Russian accounts of the Australian colonies

This paper describes the process of translating and editing a collection of reports by Russian naval officers and other visitors to Australia during the period 1807–1912. By its nature the project is one of cultural mediation in reverse, involving some back-translation in the accepted sense of the term, while in a broader sense back-translating an Australia ‘made strange’ by a new perspective, to its target audience, which constitutes the original source culture. Invoking Shklovsky’s ostranenie, the paper outlines some of the general and specific matters to be negotiated in cultural transfer involving great geographical distances and a considerable distance in time, while considering how late twentieth-century thinking on ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’ applies to an exercise of this kind.