“The literal meaning of these songs was irrelevant. What was important was their Western origin, foreign sound, and unknown references that allowed Soviet fans to imagine worlds that did not have to be linked to any “real” place or circumstances, neither Soviet nor Western.” (Yurchak 191)
In his section entitled “Translation,” Yurchak discusses the process by which Soviet youth 
and other consumers of Western musical culture often “translated” the lyrics of popular foreign songs, by, as in the instance of future film actor Alexandr Abdulov and his friends, “inventing their own elaborate translations and stories for their [The Beatles] songs” (Yurchak 191). Yet, in most contexts, the meaning of the word “translation” accounts for a slightly different, perhaps more literal, product–rather, a “written or spoken rendering of the meaning of a word or text in another language” (Oxford English Dictionary 2016). To me, the “translation” described in Yurchak’s work seems to align more the idea of the x-ray disc, in that the newly created meaning of the text is overlaid over the content, rather than presented apart from it as a completely separate product. The result is a new cultural creation that owes to both Western and Soviet influences, such as Shagin’s “Beatles” piece, unlike pure translation which, arguably, simply puts the text and meaning of one language into another one.
Something I find extremely interesting about this concept is the fact that a large portion of the Russian populous would have had access to short-wave radio programming in foreign languages, which therefore allowed some degree of foreign language education, but still chose to mostly concern themselves with their own imagined lyrics. Does this have to do with a preoccupation with what Yurchak describes as the “Imaginary West?” Or is it more a product of a lack of an extensive language education (i.e. one that would result in fluency, rather than a few phrases here and there). Another possible theory here might be that audiences were unconcerned with the actual translation of the music because they were more focused on interpreting its sound “scientifically,” such as in the case of Andrei.
