Translation and History: A Textbook

Description

This concise and accessible textbook is a comprehensive introduction to the key historical aspects of translation. Six chapters cover essential concepts in researching and writing the history of translation and translation as history. Theo Hermans presents and explains fundamental issues and questions in a clear and lively style. He includes numerous examples and case studies and offers suggestions for further reading. Four of the six chapters take their cue from ideas about historiography that are alive among professional historians. They pay attention to the role of narrative, to the emergence of transnational, transcultural, global and entangled history, and to particular fields such as the history of concepts and memory studies. Other topics include microhistory, actor–network theory and book history. With an emphasis on methodology, how to do research in translation history and how to write it up, this is an essential text for all courses on translation history and will be of interest to anyone working in translation theory and methodology. Cover Half Title Endorsement Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Preface Acknowledgements 1 Stories and Histories Three Stories From the End of the World The First Story The Second Story The Third Story Narrative Narrativism: Hayden White Before White: Barthes Historical Narratives as Artefacts What About the Truth? Applied White: Venuti After White: Pushing On, Pushing Back Socio-narrative and Translation Pushing On and Pushing Back Pushing-Hands Further Reading Bibliography 2 Translation History Key Issues Project Aims Research Questions Gathering Primary Data Assembling a Picture Looking for a Key? Cutting Up the Cake Periodisation Geographies Dynamics of Change Lineages Conditions and Opportunities Discourses About Translation The Curse of the Anthologies Notes Further Reading Bibliography 3 Questions of Scale Microhistories Microhistory and Translation Archives and Representativeness Why Microhistory? Scaling Up Provincialising Europe Connections, Trajectories Global Microhistory Entanglements The Whole World? Big Data Notes Further Reading Bibliography 4 Concepts Concepts and Conceptual History Reinhart Koselleck and Quentin Skinner Transnational Conceptual History Conceptual History On the Move: Korea Comparative Conceptual History The Global Turn Translation and Travelling Concepts The Problem of Semantic Transparency On Individualism On Barbarians? Further Reading Bibliography 5 Memory Memory Studies Transcultural Memory Memory and Translation Further Reading Bibliography 6 Translation as History Layers of Time Semantic Autonomy Layering Interlinking Translations Reading for Traces Seven Agamemnons Kinds of Traces Translation as Intervention: A Model Translation as Intervention: Illustrations Germany in 1938 Why the Earth Stood Still in China China Ca. 1900 Further Reading Bibliography Conclusion Bibliography Index