The Routledge Handbook of Translation History

Christopher Rundle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317276067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

The Routledge Handbook of Translation History presents the first comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of this multi-faceted disciplinary area and serves both as an introduction to carrying out research into translation and interpreting history and as a key point of reference for some of its main theoretical and methodological issues, interdisciplinary approaches, and research themes.

The Handbook brings together 30 eminent international scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, offering examples of the most innovative research while representing a wide range of approaches, themes, and cultural contexts. The Handbook is divided into four sections: the first looks at some key methodological and theoretical approaches; the second examines some of the key research areas that have developed an interdisciplinary dialogue with translation history; the third looks at translation history from the perspective of specific cultural and religious perspectives; and the fourth offers a selection of case studies on some of the key topics to have emerged in translation and interpreting history over the past 20 years.

This Handbook is an indispensable resource for students and researchers of translation and interpreting history, translation theory, and related areas.

Part I

Methods and Theories

1 The history of Translation Studies as a discipline

Lieven D’hulst

DOI: 10.4324/9781315640129-1

1.1 Preamble

This chapter will not re-narrate the recent history of the academic discipline of translation studies. The general outline of that history is, indeed, well known: translation studies is the result of a lasting development that began in the 1970s, has moved quickly forward since then, but is still far from having reached an advanced stage of maturity in the early twenty-first century. On that basis, a variety of more detailed overviews have been launched, up to the present day (cf. Malmkjær 2013/2017). Obviously, one could identify less considered issues that await further investigation. Think of the academic research conducted and published in less widely read languages or topics relegated to the margins of the main story (e.g., what happened to linguistically oriented translation studies?), or the role of the epigones in spreading and maintaining fashionable ideas. Not less obviously, other questions have remained largely unanswered: why has descriptive translation studies been so successful? To what extent did it merge with other approaches, such as sociology or book history? Why has the concept of translation become so flexible? What has been the balance between interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity?

Such lacunae are predictable in any historical overview. Yet, it is noteworthy that, in comparison with other disciplines that consider their own history, the history of translation studies has paid little interest to matters of historiography, i.e., the practice of history-writing. More in particular, the question remains what are or have been the historical features, constraints, choices, and effects of the enterprise that consists precisely of writing a history of modern translation studies. This chapter puts the focus on such matters because it is this author’s conviction that the writing of history in this specific domain urgently calls for more historical concern and more self-awareness. Why this is so will be discussed in the next section (and again in Section 1.6). Currently, historical concern and awareness are already fitting an upcoming trend of taking stock of theories, as noted by Federici with regard to Malmkjær and Windle’s Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies (2011): ‘“The History of Translation Theory” is taking possibly a more prominent role than discussions of new translation theories’ (2013: 107). Still, the outcome of this historiographical exercise will not be a ready-made toolset for historical research, although it may help to provide a roadmap for future histories of modern translation studies. Let there be little doubt: such a history will be a complex undertaking ¹ .

How is this chapter organised? I will first discuss the mainstream distinction between, on the one hand, the age-old history of ideas on translation commonly presented as the pre-discipline of scholarly thought and, on the other, the twentieth century self-proclaimed birth of the discipline called ‘translation studies’. Second, I will give a brief overview of a number of recent attempts to produce histories of modern translation studies. Third, I will list some of the challenges that face the design of histories to come. Fourth, I will reflect on some of the tools at the disposal of the translation historian. Finally, I will suggest an approach that extends beyond the short-term frame of contemporary translation studies and tries, instead, to embed it in a broader history of translation knowledge ² .

Two last notes. First, while I mostly refer to ‘translation studies’ as the academic discipline usually coined with capital letters (‘Translation Studies’), the term, in fact, covers endeavours with divergent scopes and methods and serves as an umbrella for an array of scholarly traditions written in languages other than English (see Section 1.4). Inevitably, the use of a single term runs the risk of ambiguity. Second, I am well aware that writing about the history of translation studies is inevitably a way of taking part in that history. Self-awareness, indeed, engages the historian no less than the historiographer (see again Section 1.5).

1.2 About pre-disciplines and disciplines

The first issue I wish to discuss is the deep-rooted conviction among translation scholars that their discipline has only recently gained a recognized position in academia in the humanities or social sciences. The following statement is representative of this conviction:

Given translation’s longstanding role in human history, the discipline of translation studies is surprisingly new. Though reflections on translation have accumulated over the centuries, only in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries did a disciplinary field develop to study it. […] In a mere half-century, translation studies has become a stimulating field of academic as well as practical interest and has begun to challenge and transform research and curricula throughout the humanities and the social sciences.

(Bermann et al. 2014: 2)

Of course, there may be some disagreement about the extent of the discipline’s capacity to transform the research agendas and curricula of other disciplines or whether academic interests have coalesced with practical ones. But the general thrust is clear if not undisputed: translation studies has acquired the status of a discipline and has freed itself from its past as a pre-discipline. To question this achievement would involve abstruse discussions that would only interest epistemologists or theorists and concern aspects that are of little interest for the broader community of translation scholars.

Be that as it may, a reflection on the coming into being of modern translation studies can still be of benefit for students and beginning scholars who try to find their way in an increasingly opaque field. A field that seems marked by many turns, by conflicting methods, and East–West divides but also by an almost ungraspable range of meanings attached to basic concepts such as equivalence, norm, agent, or system (not to forget the very concept of translation). Therefore, and quite obviously, history is called upon to provide help by setting up beacons, by explaining similarities and oppositions, and by shedding light on the logic of change. However, the introduction of a historical perspective on the emergence and ­evolution of translation studies has further implications, some of which question precisely this ingrained view of the opposition between a pre-discipline and a discipline.

First of all, why is this ‘self-chosen caesura by Western Translation studies from the 1970s’ (Schippel and Zwischenberger 2017: 10) so well accepted? Probably because it is the outcome of two equally widespread understandings of the principle of change in science, both borrowed from Thomas Kuhn’s famous inventory of models of evolution: the ‘growth’ model (science progresses by accumulation) and the model of ‘paradigm shifts’ (Kuhn 1962). It is worth pointing out that the history of translation studies features both models, as we will see further on in this chapter (see esp. Section 1.4). Let it suffice, at this point, to say that translation history probably does so in a more radical way when compared with other language disciplines and some social sciences. This holds, in particular, for the paradigm shift model ³ , one that, e.g., historians of modern linguistics are reluctant to use because there are too many different competing groups of scholars and schools and because there are too few generally accepted basic concepts and methods (cf. Kertész 2010).

Second, what exactly do translation scholars understand by a ‘discipline’? In fact, there is no real consent among historians of science on what a ‘discipline’ or a ‘field’ stands for and how one can establish enough shared evidence to distinguish between two phases of the life of a discipline: a pre-disciplinary and a disciplinary one (Shapin 1996). Not to mention that the understanding of what constitutes a discipline has itself undergone quite an evolution since the nineteenth century (Wallerstein 2001), giving way to a range of definitions of disciplines and especially of academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Admittedly, in a more practical vein, overviews and introductions to academic disciplines make use of basic toolsets of more or less measurable criteria, such as specific subject matters, theories, and methods, a strong presence in academic curricula, an acknowledged scholarly output, scholarly journals, meetings and conferences, accessible networks of scholars, and so on. There is little discussion that such criteria apply to translation studies of the twenty-first century. But defining specific subject matters or borrowing theories and methods are not historically specific to it, while other features, such as academic curricula, scholarly output, journals, meetings, and so on, have not yet been properly charted over a longer period of time ⁴ and on a sufficiently large scale, with the prospect to draw a clear demarcation line between the ‘pre-discipline’ and ‘discipline’ translation studies.

A third implication of a historical perspective is that one is expected to achieve a more accurate view of the main turning point itself, which is very likely less a snapshot than a set of different steps or phases that have gradually sustained the self-understanding of translation studies as a discipline. Take the so-called founding text of translation studies written by James Holmes. It contains a search for models that Holmes thought would be useful to accommodate this discipline (1972/1988). More in particular, Holmes made reference to Mulkay’s theory on scientific growth (1972) and laid claim to the so-called empirical sciences represented then by philosopher of science Hempel (1952). At that time, the influence of the philosophy of science on ‘adjacent disciplines, most notably Linguistics’, as interpreted by Toury (1995/2012: 3), helped to sustain similar efforts in translation studies, including the ‘very organization of the discipline’:

Main split into Pure vs. Applied branches; Pure Translation Studies further broken down into Theoretical (General and Partial) vs. Descriptive sub-branches, with Descriptive Translation Studies branching again, in terms of three different foci of research: Function-, Process-, and Product-oriented.

(Toury 1995/2012: 3)

Obviously, Holmes’s ‘disciplinary utopia’ (1972/1988: 67) was reacting against previous typologies of translation studies (or the lack thereof ⁵ ) and, perhaps less outspokenly, against the subservience of translation studies to linguistics or comparative literature. As one knows, Holmes’s map has given rise to debate (see Pym 1998: 2–3), and alternate maps have followed. For instance, while they agreed that translation studies was an empirical science, Neubert and Shreve (1992: 68) seemingly had lesser interest in epistemological issues and preferred to foreground the specific subject matter, which was translation in their case. Later on, other ways to organise the discipline were discussed at length (e.g., Van Doorslaer 2007), in which the latter was seen less as a structuring device whose inner coherence and unity needed to be made manifest than as a conglomerate of more or less independent foci of attention (e.g., Venuti 2013).

Further, more is to be learnt about the epistemological and socio-institutional features that distinguish the discipline from earlier endeavours. Lines of demarcation are less sharply cut than expected for both types of features. For instance, attempts to leverage ‘committed approaches’ (Brownlie 2010) during the 1990s disowned the empirical status of translation studies. Committed approaches

distanced themselves from the popular Descriptive Translation Studies paradigm in order to highlight power differentials reflected in texts and in translation. Particular translation practices were advocated in order to contribute to redressing geo-political and social injustices.

(Brownlie 2010: 45)

Curiously, such approaches or paradigms are still sheltered by the same discipline, although non-empirical approaches had been discarded a generation or so before as being ‘normative’, if not as tokens of the pre-disciplinary status of translation studies. This illustrates that the discipline changes together with the understanding of what a discipline is or should be, in this case by branching out its content, methods, and even subject matter. So far, it seems, translation scholars have reluctantly dealt with such issues or topics, methods, viewpoints, or practices that did not undergo strong evolutions during recent history.

A fifth implication is methodological: will new techniq...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction: The historiography of translation and interpreting
• PART I Methods and Theories
• PART II Interdisciplinary Approaches
• PART III Cultures and Religions
• PART IV Key Themes
• Index