Abstract
This chapter provides a show-and-tell case study of ways in which US-based historians of science and European translation scholars of the past two decades or so have engaged with the question of translation in the history of science. It provides insight into the ways these historians and scholars have related to one another’s scholarship, revealing the degree of interdisciplinarity and, ultimately, trust that is invested in other disciplines. In this chapter, therefore, we explore how translation history might gain the trust of other historical disciplines.
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Notes
- 1.
Robert P. Crease, ‘Physical Sciences’, in The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, ed. Robert Frodeman, Julie Thompson Klein, and Carl Mitcham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 79–87, 96.
- 2.
Carol L. Palmer, ‘Information Research on Interdisciplinarity’, in The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, 174–178, at 183.
- 3.
John H. Aldrich, Interdisciplinarity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 11.
- 4.
Scott Frickel, Mathieu Albert, and Barbara Prainsack, ‘Introduction: Investigating Interdisciplinarities’, in Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Theory and Practice across Disciplines, ed. Scott Frickel, Mathieu Albert, and Barbara Prainsack (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2017), 11.
- 5.
Herewith a recent selection (in chronological order); note that none of the works listed below deals with the question of trust and/or translation, while all are at least partly shaped by the discrete disciplinary vantage points of their authors: Julie Thompson Klein, Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1990); Bharath Sriraman, Viktor Freiman, and Nicole Lirette-Pitre, Interdisciplinarity, Creativity, and Learning: Mathematics with Literature, Paradoxes, History, Technology, and Modeling (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2009); Joe Moran, Interdisciplinarity, 2nd ed. (Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2010); Francisca Antonia Suau Jiménez and Barry Pennock Speck, Interdisciplinarity and Languages Current Issues in Research, Teaching, Professional Applications and ICT (Bern: Peter Lang, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2011); Robert Frodeman, Julie Thompson Klein, and Carl Mitcham, The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Aldrich, Interdisciplinarity; Andrew Barry and Georgina Born, Interdisciplinarity Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences (Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2013); and Ana María Rojo López and Nicolás Campos Plaza, Interdisciplinarity in Translation Studies: Theoretical Models, Creative Approaches and Applied Methods (Bern: Peter Lang, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2016).
- 6.
See Interdisciplinarity in Translation Studies, 13.
- 7.
Crease, ‘Physical Sciences’, 96.
- 8.
Palmer, ‘Information Research’, 184.
- 9.
Peter Louis Galison, ‘Trading with the Enemy’, in Trading Zones and Interactional Expertise. Creating New Kinds of Collaboration, ed. Michael E. Gorman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 25–52, at 42.
- 10.
Key works for our context are: Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. With an Introductory Essay by Ian Hacking, 4th ed. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012); Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, ‘Institutional Ecology, “Translations,” and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–1939’, in Boundary Objects and Beyond: Working with Leigh Star, ed. Geoffrey C. Bowker et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 173–195; and Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
- 11.
The ARC is one of two Australian government agencies that competitively allocate research funding to academics and researchers at Australian universities: see https://www.arc.gov.au/policies-strategies/policy/arc-statement-support-interdisciplinary-research: ‘Interdisciplinary research is conducted across the research landscape alongside other discipline-specific or single-discipline modes of enquiry. […] Interdisciplinary research can be a distinct mode of research or a combination of researchers, knowledge and/or approaches from disparate disciplines’ (accessed 12 January 2019).
- 12.
Palmer, ‘Information Research’, 184.
- 13.
Jacques Derrida, ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils’, Diacritics 13 (1983): 3–20; Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
- 14.
Julie Thompson Klein, Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity: The Changing American Academy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 5.
- 15.
Thompson Klein, Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity, 6.
- 16.
All the while insisting on the work of humanities as thriving on ‘all the contradictions of the particular, the caesura, the disturbing, the disruptive, the inexplicable, the absurd, the grotesque, the sublime, the ephemeral, and the unique. We may occasionally be prescient—but we are not policy makers, and should not accommodate or retrofit what we do with those kinds of goals in mind’ (Janet Ward, ‘Interdisciplinarity, German Studies, and the Humanities’, German Studies Review 39 (2016): 517–527).
- 17.
See in particular Thompson Klein, Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity, 55–80.
- 18.
For translation studies, Rojo López points out that scholars initially turned to literary studies and linguistics to understand the complexity of translation but today embrace other disciplines such as psychology, bilingual studies, neurology, and sociology: López and Plaza, Interdisciplinarity in Translation Studies, 13.
- 19.
Katri Huutoniemi, ‘Evaluating Interdisciplinary Research’, in The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, 309–320.
- 20.
See, for instance, Mathieu Albert, Elise Paradis, and Ayelet Kuper, ‘Interdisciplinary Fantasy: Social Scientists and Humanities Scholars Working in Faculties of Medicine’, Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration, 84–103; Jessica K. Graybill and Vivek Shandas, ‘Doctoral Student and Early Career Academic Perspectives’, in The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, 404–418; and Stephanie Pfirman and Paula J. S. Martin, ‘Facilitating Interdisciplinary Scholars’, in The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, 387–403.
- 21.
For example, Aldrich, Interdisciplinarity.
- 22.
Huutoniemi, ‘Evaluating Interdisciplinary Research’, 317.
- 23.
Peter Louis Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Metaphysics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997), 783.
- 24.
Galison, Image and Logic, 47.
- 25.
Peter Louis Galison, ‘Trading with the Enemy’, in Trading Zones, 25–52, at 267.
- 26.
Galison, Image and Logic, 873.
- 27.
Richard Krzys, ‘Library Historiography’, in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, ed. Miriam A. Drake, 2nd ed. (New York and Basel: Dekker, 2003), III, 1621–1641, at 1624.
- 28.
Scott L. Montgomery, Science in Translation: Movements of Knowledge through Cultures and Time (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 291.
- 29.
Montgomery, Science in Translation, 279 and 290.
- 30.
In particular Montgomery, Science in Translation, 253–270 and 291; repeated in ‘Scientific Translation’, in Handbook of Translation Studies, ed. Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2010), 299–305. On the current discussion on incommensurability in linguistics see David Gil, ‘Describing Languoids: When Incommensurability Meets the Language-Dialect Continuum’, Linguistic Typology 20 (2016): 439–462.
- 31.
Montgomery references in particular the 1937 paper by José Ortega y Gasset, ‘The Misery and Splendor of Translation’, trans. Carl R. Shirley, Translation Review 13 (2012): 18–30.
- 32.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, From ‘On the Different Method of Translating’, in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, trans. Waltraut Bartsch and ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 36–54, at 3.
- 33.
Montgomery, ‘Scientific Translation’, 302. By the 1930s, the notion of scientific language as a code was well established: see, for example, Ortega y Gasset, ‘The Misery and Splendor’.
- 34.
Legal translation avoids this issue by referring to parallel texts of a piece of legislature, rather than by using to the term translation: see Susan Šarčević, ‘Translation and the Law: An Interdisciplinary Approach’, in Translation Studies—An Interdiscipline, ed. Mary Snell-Hornby, Franz Pöchhacker, and Klaus Kaindl (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 1992), 301–307, at 303.
- 35.
Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 202.
- 36.
Matej Drobňák, ‘Quine on Shared Language and Linguistic Communities’, Philosophia 46 (2018): 83–99, at 85.
- 37.
Crispin Wright, ‘Indeterminacy of Translation’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Language. Volume 1, ed. Bob Hale, Crispin Wright, and Alexander Miller (Chichester, West Sussex and Malden, MA: Wiley, 2017), 670–702, at 670.
- 38.
Galison, ‘Trading with the Enemy’, 795. On Kuhn’s shifting understanding of incommensurability see Howard Sankey, ‘Kuhn’s Changing Concept of Incommensurability’, The British Society for the Philosophy of Science 44 (1993): 759–774, and Xinli Wang, Incommensurability and Cross-Language Communication (Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 25–51.
- 39.
Montgomery, Science in Translation, 4.
- 40.
US scholarship on translation referenced by Montgomery: Reuben A. Brower, On Translation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959) and Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London and New York: Routledge, 2008, 1st ed. 1995). European translation studies referenced: Translation, History, and Culture, ed. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (London and New York: Pinter Publishers, 1990).
- 41.
Mary Snell-Hornby, ‘The Turns of Translation Studies’, in Handbook of Translation Studies, ed. Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2010), 366–370, at 367.
- 42.
By comparison, at about the same time Anthony Pym developed a rich notion of interculture—meaning a space in which translators work, and languages and cultures are negotiated and displaced: Anthony Pym, Negotiating the Frontier: Translators and Intercultures in Hispanic History (London and New York: Routledge, 2014, 1st ed. 2000).
- 43.
For Skopos theory see: Christiane Nord, Translating as a Purposeful Activity: Functionalist Approaches Explained (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 1997); Katharina Reiss and Hans J. Vermeer, Towards a General Theory of Translational Action: Skopos Theory Explained (Milton Park, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013, first published in German in 1984); and Hans J. Vermeer, ‘Skopos and Commission in Translational Action’, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London and New York: Routledge, 2012, 1st ed. 2000). Earlier attempts such as Rudolf Walter Jumpelt, Die Übersetzung naturwissenschaftlicher und technischer Literatur. Sprachliche Massstäbe und Methoden zur Bestimmung ihrer Wesenszüge und Probleme (Berlin: Langenscheidt, 1961) were not picked up in the history of science. For a discussion of Jumpelt see Monika Krein-Kühle, ‘Laying the Foundations for Scientific and Technical Translation’, The Translator 17 (2011): 439–444. For the role of translators see Anthony Pym, Method in Translation History (London and New York: Routledge, 2014, 1st ed. 1998).
- 44.
For an overview see Klaus Schubert, ‘Technical Translation’, in Handbook of Translation Studies, ed. Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2010), 350–355, and Sue Ellen Wright, ‘Scientific, Technical, and Medical Translation’, in The Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies, ed. Kirsten Malmkjær and Kevin Windle (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 243–261.
- 45.
Peter Fawcett, ‘Book Review: “Science in Translation”’, The Translator 7 (2001): 99–103, at 103.
- 46.
Thompson Klein, Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity, 87.
- 47.
Maeve Olohan and Myriam Salama-Carr, ‘Translating Science’, The Translator 17 (2011): 179–199, at 180.
- 48.
Lidia Cámara and Eva Espasa, ‘The Audio Description of Scientific Multimedia’, The Translator 17 (2011): 415–437; Krein-Kühle, ‘Laying the Foundations’, and Mark Shuttleworth, ‘Translational Behaviour at the Frontiers of Scientific Knowledge’, The Translator 17 (2011): 301–323.
- 49.
Karen Bennett, ‘The Scientific Revolution and Its Repercussions on the Translation of Technical Discourse’, The Translator 17 (2011): 189–210; Min-Hsiu Liao, ‘Interaction in the Genre of Popular Science’, The Translator 17 (2011): 349–368; Hala Sharkas, ‘The Use of Glossing in Modern Original Scientific Writing in Arabic’, The Translator 17 (2011): 369–389; and Sonia Vandepitte, Liselotte Vandenbussche, and Brecht Algoet, ‘Travelling Certainties. Darwin’s Doubts and Their Dutch Translations’, The Translator 17 (2011): 275–299.
- 50.
Literary approach: Lieve Jooken and Guy Rooryck, ‘The Freedom of Expressing One’s Ideas’, The Translator 17 (2011): 233–254; Dolores Sánchez, ‘Translating Science: Contexts and Contests’, The Translator 17 (2011): 325–348; and Ruselle Meade, ‘Translation of a Discipline’, The Translator 17 (2011): 211–231.
- 51.
Another example for an interdisciplinary investigation in the history of science is the 2016 special issue ‘Translating and Translations in the History of Science’ of Annals of Science. The editor Bettina Dietz is a German-trained historian of science whose understanding of translation history references a range of translation scholars, in particular: Doris Bachmann-Medick, Übersetzung als Repräsentation fremder Kulturen (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1997); Michaela Wolf and Alexandra Fukari, Constructing a Sociology of Translation (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007); and Lawrence Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).
- 52.
The platform was established in 2002. The continuing broad interest in the local reception of Darwin is best illustrated by the seven-part series titled ‘Global Darwin’ in the journal Nature from October to December 2009, the year of the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species (24 November 1859), and the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth (12 February 1809).
- 53.
Britta Rupp-Eisenreich, ‘Darwinisme Allemand’, in Dictionnaire du Darwinisme et de l’évolution, ed. Patrick Tort (Paris: PUF, 1996).
- 54.
Sander Gliboff, H.G. Bronn, Ernst Haeckel, and the Origins of German Darwinism: A Study in Translation and Transformation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 192.
- 55.
Gliboff, H.G. Bronn, 13.
- 56.
Montgomery, Science in Translation; Nicolaas A. Rupke, ‘Translation Studies in the History of Science: The Example of Vestiges’, British Journal for the History of Science 33 (2000): 209–222.
- 57.
Thierry Hoquet, ‘Translating Natural Selection: True Concept, but False Term?’, in Classification and Evolution in Biology, Linguistics and the History of Science: Concepts–Methods–Visualization, ed. Heiner Fangerau, Hans Geisler, Thorsten Halling, and William Martin (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2013), 67–95.
- 58.
For the same time frame, studies of French, Dutch, and Italian translations of Darwin’s work (mainly concerned with On the Origin of Species) consist of relatively small-scale, detailed analyses of particular translations from English: Carmen Acuña-Partal, ‘Notes on Charles Darwin’s Thoughts on Translation and the Publishing History of the European Versions of [on] the Origin of Species’, Perspectives. Studies in Translatology 24 (2016): 7–21; Annie Brisset, ‘Clémence Royer, ou Darwin en colère’, in Portraits De Traductrices, ed. Jean Delisle (Arras, France and Ottawa: Artois Presses Université; Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 2002), 173–203; Eve-Marie Gendron-Pontbriand, ‘Le Traitement de la modalité épistémique dans les traductions françaises de “On the Origin of Species” de Charles Darwin’, Meta 61 (2016): 87–112; Vandepitte, Vandenbussche, and Algoet, ‘Travelling Certainties’; and Ana Pano Alamán and Fabio Regattin, Tradurre un classico della scienza: traduzioni e ritraduzioni dell’Origin of Species di Charles Darwin in Francia, Italia e Spagna (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2015).
- 59.
Acuña-Partal is a specialist in the Spanish reception of Darwin. For the comparative aspects she overtly relies on The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, ed. Thomas F. Glick and Elinor S. Shaffer (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). She likely is familiar with Glick’s work through Thomas F. Glick, Miguel Angel Puig-Samper, and Rosaura Ruiz, The Reception of Darwinism in the Iberian World: Spain, Spanish America, and Brazil (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2001). As mentioned, her main source for the article is the Darwin Correspondence Database http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/. This database was digitised between 2009 and 2013. A 30-volume print edition of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge University Press, 1985–) will be completed by 2022.
- 60.
The peer review process presents a double challenge in this context. On the one hand, it can be overtly limiting towards new interdisciplinary works, and often provides reviewers with few guidelines for how to evaluate interdisciplinary research. On the other hand, the current shift to process rather than product-oriented quality control which is more open to interdisciplinarity can easily fail to notice factual errors or unacknowledged limitations in interdisciplinary research. See J. Britt Holbrook, ‘Peer Review’, in The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, 321–332, and Katri Huutoniemi, ‘Evaluating Interdisciplinary Research’.
- 61.
Carla Nappi, ‘The Global and Beyond. Adventures in the Local Historiographies of Science’, Isis 104 (2013): 102–110, at 108.
- 62.
Thompson Klein, Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity, 218.
- 63.
Peter Weingart, ‘A Short History of Knowledge Formations’, in The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, 3–14, at 8.
- 64.
A selection of recent titles includes: The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics, ed. Fruela Fernandéz and Jonathan Evans (Milton Park and New York: Routledge, 2018); Henry Meschonnic, Ethics and Politics of Translating, trans. and ed. Pierre-Pascale Boulanger (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2011); Scott L. Montgomery, Does Science Need a Global Language? English and the Future of Research (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013); and Anthony Pym, On Translator Ethics. Principles for Mediation between Cultures, trans. Heike Walker (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2012).
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Rizzi, A., Lang, B., Pym, A. (2019). On Interdisciplinarity: Trusting Translation History. In: What is Translation History?. Translation History. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20099-2_4
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