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.
Author(s): Theo Hermans
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 174
City: London
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
