Translation and History

A Textbook

Theo Hermans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781351712484
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

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.

1Stories and Histories

DOI: 10.4324/9781315178134-1

Three Stories from the End of the World

Let’s begin with three stories, three historical stories, three histories.

The scene is the southernmost tip of the American continent, a collection of islands known as Tierra del Fuego. The capital of Tierra del Fuego is Ushuaia, situated on the Beagle Channel, a waterway that connects the Atlantic with the Pacific Ocean some three hundred kilometres south of the Magellan Strait. Farther south there is the desolate Cape Horn, followed by a stretch of stormy ocean and then the white vastness of Antarctica. Because the road network that covers the American continent ends at the Beagle Channel, Ushuaia prides itself on being the city at the end of the world. The end of the world is not a time but a place.

The three stories that follow concern the Anglican missionary Thomas Bridges (c. 1842–98), who spent most of his life in the area. The native people who used to live along the shores of the Beagle Channel and on the islands as far south as Cape Horn were the Yámana – or Yahgans, as Bridges called them. They were nomadic hunter-gatherers who built only temporary shelters and used canoes to move from island to island. Bridges learnt their language, set up a mission among them where several previous attempts had failed and eventually, in the 1880s, with the help of indigenous converts, translated parts of the Bible into Yámana. Here is the story of this translation and the events surrounding it.

The first story

In 1856, aged just fourteen, Thomas Bridges travelled from England to the Falkland Islands (also known as the Malvinas, to the east of Tierra del Fuego). The Patagonian Missionary Society ran a mission station there and persuaded some Yámana from Tierra del Fuego to spend longer or shorter periods at the station. Bridges initially learnt the language from them, one of the very few outsiders ever to gain any fluency in it. In return he taught the Yámana to read and write English, using a phonetic script. He became an excellent linguist. When, in October 1866, a visiting chaplain conducted a service attended by thirteen Yámana, Bridges was able to act as interpreter (Bull 1867, 48). Around this time, he also started work on a grammar and a dictionary of the language.

Bridges briefly returned to England in 1868–9 to be ordained. Soon afterwards, the mission at Ushuaia was established and this became his new home. In 1872, a first group of thirty-six Yámana were baptised at Ushuaia. In a letter dated 11 March 1872 and published in the South American Missionary Magazine, to which he contributed regularly, Bridges mentioned that his plan to translate one of the Gospels had made little progress due to his still imperfect grasp of the language, its ‘poverty and peculiar construction’, and the amount of daily toil required to keep the new settlement going (T. Bridges 1872, 98). He felt ‘unable to make a satisfactory translation in which you are tied by words’, but a paraphrase seemed feasible (T. Bridges 1872, 99). A year later, he reported another challenge: the Yámana had no inkling of the kind of world portrayed in the Bible, so that, explaining one story to them, ‘I should have to explain who a publican was, what the taxes were for, and the necessity of persons paying, and for others to receive taxes’; with regard to another story, he had to ‘tell them who Caesar was, and how one country had subjugated others, and how it became necessary to obey foreign governors, and submit to foreign taxation, which the Jews so rebelled against’ (T. Bridges 1873, 28). In 1875, he still had not made a start due to a lack of time to study the language ‘and many difficulties’ (T. Bridges 1875, 220).

By the close of the decade he was more confident, reporting ‘good progress in a deepening knowledge’ of the language, which he now also recognised as ‘unique, and wonderfully erected’, concluding that ‘I feel I must spend my time on the language in completing dictionary and grammar, and then in translating portions of God’s Word’ (T. Bridges 1879, 103). The grammar was never completed but the dictionary, which ran to over 32,000 entries, was eventually, after many tribulations, published in 1933.

From the end of 1879 through to March 1881, Bridges was in England again, partly for health reasons and partly to see his first translation, the Gospel of Luke, into print. He wrote his second translation, the Acts of the Apostles, during the outward voyage across the Atlantic; it appeared in print in 1883. A third translation, the Gospel of John, followed in 1886. All three translations, each printed in 500 copies, employed the phonetic script he had been using to teach the Yámana to write. All three are slight little books of around 100 pages that fit into the palm of one’s hand. Their title pages do not mention a translator. Most remarkably, they offer only plain text, without any introductory material or explanatory notes. In view of the difficulties Bridges reported in conveying the Biblical world to people wholly unfamiliar with it, the question arises: why are the translations as bare as they are and feature neither introductions nor annotations?

Illustrations 1 and 2Title page and opening verses of Thomas Bridges’ Yámana translation of the Gospel of John, 1886. (Reproduction courtesy of Boston University School of Theology Library and Boston Library Consortium.)

The answer lies in the institutional context supporting Bridges’ efforts. The books were published in London by the British and Foreign Bible Society, which possessed both the financial means and the technical equipment to print a wide range of scripts. Because, from its foundation in 1802, the Society catered for different Protestant denominations and missionary organisations, it adopted the principle that all Bible translations into foreign languages had to appear without doctrinal and therefore potentially divisive notes or comments (Mak 2015). When missionaries objected that without explanatory glosses the Bible remained incomprehensible to their audiences, the Society, keen to secure its fundraising base among all Protestant persuasions in Britain, advised that oral explication could be provided locally. This may explain the small, eminently portable format of Bridges’ translations. In the texts themselves, Bridges appears to have tried to gloss the Biblical world in terms the Yámana could recognise. A short passage (Luke 1:1–13), which Bridges on one occasion back-translated into English, affords a glimpse of his technique. Where the Authorised Version – almost certainly Bridges’ point of departure – mentions ‘incense’, Bridges has ‘oil’ or ‘sweet oil’, with ‘the altar of incense’ becoming ‘the place (structure) where the oil was burned’. In a similar vein, ‘angel’ is rendered as ‘messenger’ and ‘priest’ as ‘appointed teacher’ (Ellis 1884, 48–9).

When Bridges returned to Ushuaia from England with his translation of Luke’s Gospel, he reported that the natives were pleased to see their language in print for the first time (Marsh 1883, 130). In missionary circles his work earned extravagant praise. The Narrative of the Origin and Progress of the South American Mission spoke of the mission in Tierra del Fuego as having succeeded despite ‘almost insurmountable obstacles’ and ‘bitter disappointments’, a case of ‘Divine promises abundantly fulfilled, […] of faith triumphing over impossibilities, and removing mountains of difficulty’ (Marsh 1883, 116–7). A year later, one patron of the South American Missionary Society lauded Bridges’ translation as ‘one of the greatest missionary triumphs ever achieved’, pointing out that the formerly depraved Yámana were now ‘an industrious people engaged in the arts of agriculture, and performing many of the duties of civilized life’ (SAMS 1884, 59).

The overlap between the mission’s evangelising and civilising role is at the heart of the second story, which is not one of triumph but of ruin.

The second story

While European sailors had had occasional brief encounters with the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego since around 1600, the first extended contact took place in 1830 when the crew of the Beagle captured four natives and took them back to England. Two years later, the Beagle returned to Tierra del Fuego with the three surviving natives on board as well as, famously, Charles Darwin, then aged twenty-three. Darwin’s description of the Fuegians he met in what became subsequently known as the Beagle Channel was uncomplimentary. Believing them (wrongly) to be cannibals, he spoke of them as ‘savages of the lowest grade’ and ‘stunted miserable wretches’, although he also recognised that they were fully adjusted to the harsh climate and did not appear to be decreasing in number (Darwin 1989, 172, 179, 181). In later years Darwin continued to take an interest in Tierra del Fuego. He contacted Thomas Bridges in 1860 for his book on the expression of emotions in humans and animals, and he patronised the South American Missionary Society.

In the course of the 1860s, as his command of the language improved, Bridges began to write ethnographic accounts of the Yámana, describing them as morally degraded but fiercely egalitarian: no one told anyone else what to do (T. Bridges 1866). As the Ushuaia settlement took shape, he reported the health of the people as being generally good. He also made efforts to get them accustomed to wearing clothes as well as to regular labour and a sedentary lifestyle, and he spoke with them about the concept of owning land (T. Bridges 1870a, 41; 1870b, 131). He regularly thanked well-wishers in Britain for the clothes they sent (T. Bridges 1873, 29; 1884a, 33–4; 1884b, 222). He was obviously unaware that the clothes and other European items might carry germs and diseases deadly to the people of Tierra del Fuego.

By the time Bridges was having his translations printed, the Yámana population was in rapid decline. In June 1884, Bridges conducted a census which recorded a population of only about 1,000, less than half, he noted, of what it had been twelve years earlier and under a third of what it had been thirty years back (T. Bridges 1884b, 223; 1885, 289). In early 1886, Bridges estimated that there were about 400 Yámana left (Hyades 1886, 202–4). On the eve of the First World War, the population was estimated at around 100 (Cooper 1917, 74). The Yámana ceased to exist as a people. What had caused the tragedy?

A first epidemic in 1863–4 appears to have left some 500 dead, but by the end of the decade Bridges reported that few deaths were occurring (A. Chapman 2010, 481; T. Bridges 1870a, 41). In the early 1880s, however, tuberculosis and then measles decimated the Yámana. Bridges registered the high mortality but denied it was due to the presence of outsiders and the clothes they brought (T. Bridges 1882), just as a few years earlier the bishop of the Falklands did not think ‘the Fuegians suffer in health through increased civilization’ (as Bartholomew Sullivan reported to Darwin in 1874; Burckhardt and Secord 2015, 108). The French doctor Paul Hyades (1847–1919), who had accompanied a French scientific expedition to Tierra del Fuego in 1882–3 and tended the sick at Ushuaia during that period, thought differently. He reckoned that the changed lifestyle of the Yámana and their contact with whites had left them defenceless against epidemics, especially since Argentina had now established an administrative presence in Ushuaia (Hyades 1884; 1885a; 1885b).

The episode in question occurred in September 1884. Following a territorial agreement with Chile, the Argentine navy sent four ships to Ushuaia to set up a subprefecture there. A ceremony was held to assert sovereign rights and hoist the national flag. In true colonial fashion, Thomas Bridges pledged loyalty to the Argentine state on behalf of the indigenous people at the mission station (L. Bridges 2019, 126–7), even though the symbolism of the raising of the flag and the very idea of national sovereignty must have passed them by. The subprefecture was staffed by about thirty men and their officers, a dramatic increase in the number of whites compared with the handful of missionaries until then (Hyades 1886). Six months later, Bridges reported that the Yámana population had declined by half in less than a year (Hyades 1885b, 463). For the Yámana, the arrival of the whites meant the end of their world. Nevertheless, in Britain, the anthropologist J.G. Garson, writing in a leading journal in 1886, sti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Endorsements Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Stories and Histories
• 2 Translation History
• 3 Questions of Scale
• 4 Concepts
• 5 Memory
• 6 Translation as History
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index