joint reading: a conundrum?

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smith is a native english speaker, who over time has taught himself to read the russian cryllic alphabet, and read aloud russian text. he does not know the rest of the language, just the writing.

dmitriy is a russian, in good command of his spoken mother tongue...but, he is illiterate, he cannot read.

one day, dmitriy gets a letter from a distant relative, which he unfortunately cannot read, so he calls smith and asks him to read it to him. smith reads the letter aloud (not knowing what he's saying of course), while dmitriy listens, and understands it.

they are both happy. but who is 'reading' in this situation? note that reading implies fully understanding the written material

Hi

If "reading" involves both reading the written text and then understanding it, then neither of them is doing reading. However, two of them are doing it together as if they were one person. Therefore, as you put it in the title, they are jointly reading. Well, that's my opinion. Or is there some trick in this?

How does dmitriy communicate with smith by the way? dmitriy needs to be able to make smith understand that he wants him to read the letter aloud so that he (dmitriy) can understand it. But from the description, they don't seem to have a means to communicate with each other.

well, i was reading a language encyclopedia (i read encyclopedias like novels), and this kind of riddle appeared and piqued my interest, so i decided to share it.

and sorry, i didn't really have the communication between the two in mind when i typed this and i don't remember anything of it from the encyclopedia. maybe there is a third language they both know? but i think you are right.