This book is about translation history and how it might be written. In addressing these questions, we explore some of the leading concepts and approaches that historians (of literature, language, culture, society, science, translation, and interpreting) engage with when they encounter translation. We have written this book with historians in mind, as well as scholars and students of translation studies. In the present chapter we draw a long bow by considering the conceptual foundations of translation history in order to propose a way forward.
Before discussing what translation history can be, let us propose what we think it could best do: namely, address issues of complex social causation that enable or hinder intercultural communication.1 We submit that translationâby which we mean a spoken or written text-based interlingual transferâis not possible without trust. By studying translation with reference to trust we can reach a clearer understanding of why translations were produced in the first place, and what challenges they appear to have âsolvedâ.
In broad terms, we contend that rather than fine-tuning or even challenging key concepts from translation studies (for instance the resemblance and relationality between start and target texts), translation history as a field of inquiry needs to hone its own conceptual tools and methodologies. These more flexible resources, in turn, can build a stronger bridge between discrete disciplines, and foster a greater awareness of translation among historians, as well as greater methodological confidence among scholars of translation.
Our contribution to honing methodology and concepts is to place the concept of trust at the centre of translation history. Including trust in our purview complements and expands the value of approaches that have been recommended and studied for years: researching translators as people in addition to translations as texts; examining translation normsâsince norm-adherence can be one of the bases of trustâand investigating translator-client relations, collaborative translation, and translation cultures. All of these matters have been studied before, so what does this book do that is new?
By examining theories and practices of trust from sociological, philosophical, and historical studies, and with reference to interdisciplinarity, we outline a methodology that enables us to approach translation history and intercultural mediation from three discrete, concurrent perspectives on trust and translation: the interpersonal, the institutional, and the regime-enacted.2 Further, we suggest the use of trust as both an object of study and an analytical tool for understanding intercultural mediation. This involves recognising that trust is not the âinnocentâ concept it is often taken to be, but one requiring closer empirical and theoretical attention than it has so far received in translation studies. Trust describes social practices (including translation) and also constructs them.3
What might a translation history that includes trust look like? To canvass a reply, we address the following array of related questions: first and foremost, as we have already anticipated, what is translation history? Why is the trust aspect of translation history important, and what problems can it address? Who and what is trusted in translation and interpreting? What kinds of trust exist in translation? And, following from these questions, how might we write interdisciplinary translation history that is trustworthy in its claims to represent a genuine, localised encounter between two or more disciplines?
Each chapter offers a response to these questions in a manner that began with self-reflexive enquiry. The authors of this volume work on translation from different and complementary perspectives: Andrea Rizzi is a literary historian, Anthony Pym is a translation scholar, and Birgit Lang is a cultural historian. In writing this volume we have each been brought to examine more openly our different perspectives on translation from these formative vantage points, appreciating ways in which our backgrounds have also conditioned our respective styles of writing. We have chosen to use the plural âweâ as the speaking subject of all chapters as a mark of our collaborative ethos, and to underscore our unity in diversity. We discuss and refine our positions and arguments not to find essentialist common ground, but to hone our ideas for the near future of translation history as a robust and incisive field of empirical research and dialogue.
We have not wished to write a book that insists on a narrow suite of norms or methodologies for the study of translation history. Our wish is to propose a new area for attention that can inspire historians and translation scholars to explore more closely the role of translators, interpreters, translations, and their clients in the history of intercultural exchange. As the first volume of the Translation History series published by Palgrave Macmillan, we hope that this contribution will mark the beginning of an enriching conversation about the role that translation history can play in enhancing our understanding of cultural mediation in the past, and in the present.
What is Translation History?
Since at least 1992, scholars have lamented a âlack of history in translation historyâ.4 At the same time, literary historians have engaged with philosophical and social theories to explain practices and theories of translation. For instance, literary historians Rita Copeland, Lawrence Venuti, and Marie-Alice Belle have adopted the Foucauldian concept of genealogy to identify and explain historical attitudes and to understandings of translationâfluency, transparency, progress, imitation, and assimilation, among others.5 The social turn within translation studies has brought key concepts from the work of French sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour: social capital, habitus, and network are some of the most significant ideas to have influenced studies of translation and translators over the past twenty years. In the last seven years, UK and North-American-based literary historians have contributed to more nuanced approaches to the study of early modern translation in Europe in the context of social and commercial changes. This scholarship calls for closer collaboration between literary and book historians by âsituating translators at the interfaceâ between the production and consumption of texts.6
Meanwhile, trustâas a key socio-cultural aim and ambition for intercultural mediationâhas remained underexplored in translation.7 Fundamentally, we propose, translators and interpreters exchange their trustworthiness.8 Over the past thirty years, scholars of literature, translation, and science have produced substantial histories of translation and interpreting in English.9 Historians have only comparatively recently engaged with interlingual and textual translation as the centrepiece of their research.10 In the literature on history and translation that has been published in the last fifty years or so, very few studies have offered what Julio-CĂ©sar Santoyo has called âa global or globalising vision of what the translation activity has been throughout its approximately four thousand, five hundred years of historyâ.11 Here we understand Santoyo to be referring to histories focussing on practices of translation rather than theories, because there is no shortage of anthologies of ancient, early modern, modern, and contemporary statements on theories of translation. In these edited collections, excerpts from Marcus Tullius Cicero, Jerome (Eusebius Hieronymus), Martin Luther, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and twentieth-century intellectuals tend to be anthologised chronologically, and according to the generally positivist understanding that changes in approach become progressively more sophisticated.12 Most of these anthologies focus on Euro-American theories, but 2006 saw the publication of a trailblazing anthology of early modern Chinese texts presenting concepts and practices relating to translation.13
To date, most contributions to translation history can be described as collections of essays or monographs on translation theories and practices from a particular region, language, or period.14 Fortunately, research during the past three decades has produced studies that seek to chart the history of translation in the east and west beyond specific nations or regions, and across centuries.15 Now there are also available edited collections and dedicated journal issues that foreground specific aspects of translation and interpreting: methodologies (Pym, LĂ©pinette, and AlcalĂĄ), travel and translation (De Bi...