A literary translation cycle disentangles transmission pressures from sociocultural changes in cultural evolution

Many theories of cultural evolution emphasize the influence of repeated transmission. Folktales, myths, and other cultural stories offer a testbed for these theories [1, 2]. In the real world, however, the transmission of a cultural story is often confounded with large-scale changes in linguistic or cultural context, making it difficult to identify the mechanisms of cultural change and stability. Here, to unravel this theoretical tangle, we analyze an unusual natural experiment: due to a misunderstanding, a story attributed to the Russian novelist Tolstoy was translated repeatedly in a full cycle, with the first and final versions published in the same language (English), country (USA), city (Chicago), and decade (1890s) [3]. Since this cycle of cultural transmission began and ended in the same linguistic-cultural context, it offers a unique opportunity to isolate the effects of repeated transmission from the effects of changing the broader sociocultural context. We transformed each version of the story into a high-dimensional trajectory through a shared, multilingual semantic space. We find that the story’s overall shape was preserved throughout the translation cycle. Versions produced within the same linguistic-cultural context, moreover, were especially similar. Each step of the translation process, however, incrementally distorted the story; the final English version was thus more similar to the Russian and French than to the original English, despite both English versions appearing in the same language and location. These findings demonstrate how cultural transmission can preserve complex meanings while introducing incremental changes that reflect both individual-level and broader sociocultural influences. Cultural evolution is shaped both by the transmission process and the broader cultural milieu in which it occurs.