Abstract
Relativity, in the humanities, initially concerns the ways that an object can be seen differently from different perspectives. What you describe as a historian depends on where you are and why you are doing history, so your description is never a neutral or wholly objective portrayal. This chapter proposes that the way to live with relativity in translation involves accepting it, outing our personal and cultural involvement, and not shying away from the uncomfortable things of history. It also concerns critically revising facile assumptions of a confronted self and other, which in history are always more than a simple confrontation: they are, for example, complicated by the underlying dissemination of technologies, the spread of the western translation form, and the negotiation of translation regimes. This means that the positions from which we work, our assumed groundings, are themselves in translational movement. Awareness of these movements means that the task of translation history is not just to undo illusions of objectivity, but also to elaborate the possibilities of history as a mode of tracking and changing perceptions, and of keeping check on ourselves as we seek to change perceptions.
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Notes
- 1.
Niklas Luhmann, Vertrauen. Ein Mechanismus der Reduktion sozialer Komplexität (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1989, 1st ed. 1968).
- 2.
Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme: Grundriss einer allgemeinen Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984) and Die Realität der Massenmedien (Wiesbaden: Westdeutsche Verlag, 1996, 1st ed. 1995).
- 3.
Theo Hermans, ‘Translation, Irritation and Resonance’, in Constructing a Sociology of Translation, ed. Michaela Wolf and Alexandra Fukari (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2007), 57–75 and Hans J. Vermeer, Luhmann’s ‘Social Systems’ Theory: Preliminary Fragments for a Theory of Translation (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2006), 6.
- 4.
Anthony Pym, Negotiating the Frontier. Translators and Intercultures in Hispanic History (London and New York: Routledge, 2014, 1st ed. 2000).
- 5.
Charles Gibson, Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Agustín Bárcena (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1991, 1st ed. 1952), 79–84.
- 6.
Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, 181 (our translation).
- 7.
Paul Cohen, ‘Torture and Translation in the Multilingual Courtrooms of Early Modern France’, Renaissance Quarterly 69 (2016): 899–939.
- 8.
Anthony Pym, ‘Risk Analysis as a Heuristic Tool in the Historiography of Interpreters. For an Understanding of Worst Practices’, in New Insights in the History of Interpreting, ed. Jesús Baigorri-Jalón and Kayoko Takeda (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2016), 247–269.
- 9.
Anthony Pym, Method in Translation History (London and New York: Routledge, 2014, 1st ed. 1998).
- 10.
Sergia Adamo, ‘Microhistory of Translation’, in Charting the Future of Translation History. Current Discourses and Methodology, ed. Georges L. Bastin and Paul F. Bandia (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006), 81–100. See also Jeremy Munday, ‘Using Primary Sources to Produce a Microhistory of Translation and Translators: Theoretical and Methodological Concerns’, The Translator 20 (2014): 64–80 and references therein.
- 11.
Carlo Ginzburg, Il formaggio e i vermi. Il cosmo di un mugnaio del ’500 (Turin: Einaudi, 1999, 1st ed. 1976), and Peter Burke, ‘Overture to the New History: Its Past and Future’, in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001, 1st ed. 1991), 1–24. On Alltagsgeschichte see David F. Crew, ‘Alltagsgeschichte: A New Social History “From Below?”’, Central European History 22 (1989): 394–407. Michel Serres, Hermès III. La traduction (Paris: Minuit, 1974) and Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires France, 1968).
- 12.
Anthony Pym, ‘Twelfth-Century Toledo and Strategies of the Literalist Trojan Horse’, Target 6 (1994): 43–66 and ‘Lives of Henri Albert, Nietzschean Translator’, in Translators’ Strategies and Creativity, ed. Ann Beylard-Ozeroff, Jana Králová, and Barbara Moser-Mercer (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 1998), 117–125.
- 13.
Ginzburg, Il formaggio e i vermi, 101–105.
- 14.
William Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 202.
- 15.
Andrew Chesterman, ‘Universalism in Translation Studies’, Translation Studies 7 (2014): 82–90, at 82.
- 16.
The Pushing-Hands of Translation and its Theory. In Memoriam Martha Cheung, 1953–2013, ed. Douglas Robinson (London and New York: Routledge, 2016).
- 17.
Outi Paloposki and Kaisa Koskinen, ‘A Thousand and One Translations: Revisiting Retranslation’, in Claims, Change and Challenges in Translation Studies, ed. Gyde Hansen, Kirsten Malmkjaer, and Daniel Gile (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2004), 27–38 and James Hadley, ‘Indirect Translation and Discursive Identity: Proposing the Concatenation Effect Hypothesis’, Translation Studies 10 (2017): 183–197.
- 18.
For some of the usages and claims, see Anthony Pym, Exploring Translation Theories, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 138–154.
- 19.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1960).
- 20.
John Paul II, Slavorum Apostoli, https://goo.gl/ZS8LPx (accessed 19 January 2019).
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Varietates Legitimae. Inculturation and the Roman Liturgy: Instruction, 29 March 1994, http://www.adoremus.org/doc_inculturation.html (accessed 20 January 2019).
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Consilium for Implementing the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Comme le prévoit. On the Translation of Liturgical Texts for Celebrations with a Congregation, 1969, https://goo.gl/zne7JH (accessed 20 January 2019), 21.
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Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Liturgiam authenticam. On the Use of Vernacular Languages in the Publication of the Books of the Roman Liturgy, 28 March 2001, https://goo.gl/GKpTGf (accessed 20 January 2019), 5.
- 27.
For an early and still-valid critique of this silencing, see Sherry Simon, ‘Délivrer la Bible. La théorie d’Eugène Nida’, Meta 32 (1987): 429–437.
- 28.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini. Essai sur l’extériorité (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1961) and Entre nous, essais sur le penser à l’autre (Paris: Grasset, 199).
- 29.
Antoine Berman, La traduction et la lettre ou l’Auberge du lointain (Paris: Seuil, 1999, first published 1985), 74.
- 30.
Ibid., 89.
- 31.
Karl Marx, Misère de la philosophie (Paris and Brussels: A. Frank, C. H. Vogler, 1847), 100 (our translation).
- 32.
Anthony Pym, ‘Translators Do More than Translate. Paper presented to the International Federation of Translators World Congress, Brisbane, 2017’, unpublished and Dorothy Kenny, ‘Sustaining Disruption? The Transition from Statistical to Neural Machine Translation’, Revista Tradumàtica. Tecnologies de la Traducció 16 (2018): 59–70.
- 33.
Antonio Ballesteros Beretta, Alfonso X el Sabio (Barcelona: El Albir, 1984), 815.
- 34.
John Milton, ‘As traduções do Clube do Livro’, TradTerm 3 (1996): 47–65.
- 35.
Karin Littau, ‘First steps Towards a Media History of Translation’, Translation Studies 4 (2011): 261–281 and Anthony Pym, ‘The Medieval Postmodern in Translation Studies’, in And Translation Changed the World (and the World Changed Translation), ed. Alberto Fuertes and Ester Torres-Simón (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 105–123.
- 36.
Marx, Misère de la philosophie, 100 (our translation).
- 37.
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1934).
- 38.
Naoki Sakai, ‘The Modern Regime of Translation and Its Politics’, in A History of Modern Translation Knowledge: Sources, Concepts, Effects, ed. Lieven D’hulst and Yves Gambier (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2018), 61–74 and Bernardo A. Michael, Statemaking and Territory in South Asia: Lessons from the Anglo–Gorkha War (1814–1816) (London: Anthem, 2012). On Siam see also Thongchai Winichakul, ‘Siam Mapped: The Making of Thai Nationhood’, The Ecologist 26 (1996): 205–221.
- 39.
Yukino Semizu, ‘Invisible Translation: Reading Chinese Texts in Ancient Japan’, in Translating Others, ed. Theo Hermans (Manchester: St. Jerome, 2006), II, 283–295, at 283; Ronit Ricci, ‘On the Untranslatability of “Translation”: Considerations from Java, Indonesia’, in Translation in Asia: Theories, Practices, Histories, ed. Ronit Ricci and Jan van der Putten (Manchester: St. Jerome, 2011), 57–72, at 62; Harish Trivedi, ‘In Our Own Time, On Our Own Terms: “Translation’ in India”’, Translating Others, I, 102–119, at 104, 106, 107; and Saliha Paker, ‘Ottoman Conceptions of Translation and its Practice: The 1897 “Classics Debate” as a Focus of Examining Change’, Translating Others, II, 325–348, at 345.
- 40.
Roberto Valdeón, Translation and the Spanish Empire in the Americas (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2014), 4.
- 41.
Ibid., 14.
- 42.
See Colin Tatz, ‘Confronting Australian Genocide’, Aboriginal History 25 (2001): 16–36.
- 43.
Laura Rademaker, Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018).
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Rizzi, A., Lang, B., Pym, A. (2019). On Relativity: Trusting Historians. In: What is Translation History?. Translation History. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20099-2_3
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