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[xmca] Was Tool and Sign Retranslated From English?



In the prologue to Volume Four of the English language Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky (Plenum 1997, p. vi), Joseph Glick says that Tool and Sign in Child Devleopment was translated from the English manuscript. This claim is also made in van der Veer and Valsiner's Understanding Vygotsy (Blackwell, 1991, p. 188).
 
But on p. 174 of the Vygotsky Reader, footnote 60 refers to a handwritten note on the English manuscript that refers the reader to a "Russian original". This MIGHT suggest that the Russian original was lost and the the Russian version printed in the Russian Collected Works (and also translated into English in the volume introduced by Professor Glick) really was translated from the English. 
 
But that version is clearly in a less heaviliy edited state (with far more repetitions and redundancies). This has been explained by "editorial manipulations". But the problem is that the repetitions and redundancies are not word for word; it's not the sort of thing a manipulating editor would do.
 
But it is the sort of thing that an author who had large amounts of text virtually memorized (for the purpose of classes) might do in the days before cutting and pasting on a computer. That is, Vygotsky and/or Luria would have a huge amount of argument almost word for word in several places in the manuscript and then cut one or the other before translation for publication (when they noticed the redundancy).
 
Does anyone know Professor Glick?  I would like to know about the claim that the Russian manuscript was retranslated from English.
 
David Kellogg
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
 
mbol
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