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.

This book presents a dynamic history of the ways in which translators are trusted and distrusted. Working from this premise, the authors develop an approach to translation that speaks to historians of literature, language, culture, society, science, translation and interpreting. By examining theories of trust from sociological, philosophical, and historical studies, and with reference to interdisciplinarity, the authors outline a methodology for approaching translation history and intercultural mediation from three discrete, concurrent perspectives on trust and translation: the interpersonal, the institutional and the regime-enacted. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of translation studies, as well as historians working on mediation and cultural transfer.

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.

Over the last 30 years there has been a substantial increase in the study of the history of translation. Both well-known and lesser-known specialists in translation studies have worked tirelessly to give the history of translation its rightful place. Clearly, progress has been made, and the history of translation has become a viable independent research area. This book aims at claiming such autonomy for the field with a renewed vigour. It seeks to explore issues related to methodology as well as a variety of discourses on history with a view to laying the groundwork for new avenues, new models, new methods. It aspires to challenge existing theoretical and ideological frameworks. It looks toward the future of history. It is an attempt to address shortcomings that have prevented translation history from reaching its full disciplinary potential. From microhistory, archaeology, periodization, to issues of subjectivity and postmodernism, methodological lacunae are being filled. Contributors to this volume go far beyond the text to uncover the role translation has played in many different times and settings such as Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Middle-east and Asia from the 6th century to the 20th. These contributions, which deal variously with the discourses on methodology and history, recast the discipline of translation history in a new light and pave the way to the future of research and teaching in the field.

This book, the first of its kind for an English-language audience, introduces a fresh perspective on the Polish literary translation landscape, providing unique insights into the social, political, and ideological underpinnings of Polish translation history. Employing a problem-based approach, the book creates a map of different research directions in the history of literary translation in Poland, highlighting a holistic perspective on the discipline’s development in the region. The four sections explore topics of particular interest in current translation research, including translation and cultural borderlands, the agency of women translators, translators as intercultural mediators, and the intersection of translation research and digital methods. The 15 contributions demonstrate the ways in which Polish culture has represented translated work in its own way, informed and shaped by socio-political changes in Polish history. At the same time, the volume situates Polish research in translation within the growing body of work on Central and Eastern European translation studies, as well as looking at them against the backdrop of the international development of the discipline. This collection offers a valuable addition to existing research on Western literary canons, making it key reading for scholars in translation studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and Slavonic studies.

A History of Modern Translation Knowledge is the first attempt to map the coming into being of modern thinking about translation. It breaks with the well-established tradition of viewing history through the reductive lens of schools, theories, turns or interdisciplinary exchanges. It also challenges the artificial distinction between past and present and it sustains that the latter’s historical roots go back far beyond the 1970s. Translation Studies is but part of a broader set of discourses on translation we propose to label “translation knowledge”. This book concentrates on seven processes that make up the history of modern translation knowledge: generating, mapping, internationalising, historicising, analysing, disseminating and applying knowledge. All processes are covered by 58 domain experts and allocated over 55 chapters, with cross-references. This book is indispensable reading for advanced Master- and PhD-students in Translation Studies who need background information on the history of their field, with relevance for Europe, the Americas and large parts of Asia. It will also interest students and scholars working in cultural and social history.

Translation: Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader responds to the need for a collection of primary texts on translation, in the English tradition, from the earliest times to the present day. Based on an exhaustive survey of the wealth of available materials, the Reader demonstrates throughout the link between theory and practice, with excerpts not only of significant theoretical writings but of actual translations, as well as excerpts on translation from letters, interviews, autobiographies, and fiction. The collection is intended as a teaching tool, but also as an encyclopaedia for the use of translators and writers on translation. It presents the full panoply of approaches to translation, without necessarily judging between them, but showing clearly what is to be gained or lost in each case. Translations of key texts, such as the Bible and the Homeric epic, are traced through the ages, with the same passages excerpted, making it possible for readers to construct their own map of the evolution of translation and to evaluate, in their historical contexts, the variety of approaches. The passages in question are also accompanied by ad verbum versions, to facilitate comparison. The bibliographies are likewise comprehensive. The editors have drawn on the expertise of leading scholars in the field, including the late James S. Holmes, Louis Kelly, Jonathan Wilcox, Jane Stevenson, David Hopkins, and many others. In addition, significant non-English texts, such as Martin Luther's "Circular Letter on Translation," which may be said to have inaugurated the Reformation, are included, helping to set the English tradition in a wider context. Related items, such as the introductions to their work by Tudor and Jacobean translators or the work of women translators from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries have been brought together in "collages," marking particularly important moments or developments in the history of translation. This comprehensive reader provides an invaluable and illuminating resource for scholars and students of translation and English literature, as well as poets, cultural historians, and professional translators.