Abstract
By discussing examples and sources from premodern history and early modern Europe in particular, this chapter closely examines the interpersonal, institutional, and regime-enacted types of trust, as well as the ethos of past and present translators and interpreters from the perspective of trust-signalling and its reception. This discussion of translation centred on the theme of trust invites scholars to follow translators, their work, and their networks of trust both downstream (from the translated text or culture to readers and clients) and upstream (from the reception of a given translation and translator to the translated text or request to translate).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Paul Cohen, ‘Torture and Translation in the Multilingual Courtrooms of Early Modern France’, Renaissance Quarterly 69 (2016), 899–939, at 911. Italics are in Cohen’s article, and denote the use of Latin.
- 2.
Carla Nappi, ‘Full. Empty. Stop. Go: Translating Miscellany in Early Modern China’, in Early Modern Cultures of Translation, ed. Karen Newman and Jane Tylus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 212–227, at 224.
- 3.
Marie-Alice Belle, ‘At the Interface between Translation History and Literary History: A Genealogy of the Theme of “Progress” in Seventeenth-Century English Translation History and Criticism’, The Translator 20 (2014): 44–63.
- 4.
Thomas Gray (1716–1771): ‘Progress of Poetry from Greece to Italy, and from Italy to England’. Quoted from Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, ed. David Fairer and Christine Gerrard (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 426.
- 5.
William H. Jr. Sewell, Logics of History. Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 76.
- 6.
On pseudotranslation see at least Gideon Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 1995), 40–52; Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies: Investigations in Homage to Gideon Toury, ed. Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger, and Daniel Simeoni (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2008), especially 133–162; and James Thomas, ‘Fabre d’Olivet’s Le Troubadour and the Textuality of Pseudotranslation’, in Literary Translation. Redrawing the Boundaries, ed. Jean Boase-Beier, Antoinette Fawcett, and Philip Wilson (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 134–148.
- 7.
Sewell, Logics of History, 329.
- 8.
See for instance Andrea Rizzi, Vernacular Translators in Quattrocento Italy. Scribal Culture, Authority, and Agency (Turnhour: Brepols, 2017).
- 9.
Sewell, Logics of History, 109.
- 10.
Paul D. McLean, Culture in Networks (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2017), 24.
- 11.
Sewell, Logics of History, 136.
- 12.
We quote from Susan Miller, Trust in Texts. A Different History of Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 83.
- 13.
Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 89.
- 14.
Paul D. McLean, The Art of the Network: Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 3.
- 15.
Michael Cronin, Translation and Globalisation (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 26, 42–75.
- 16.
Anthony Pym, ‘Cross-Cultural Networking: Translators in the French-German Network of Petites Revues at the End of the Nineteenth Century’, Meta 52 (2007): 744–762. See also the other articles in the special issue on La traduction et les études de réseaux/Translation and Network Studies, ed. Hélène Buzelin and Deborah Folaron in Meta 52(4) (2007).
- 17.
Anthony Pym, Method in Translation History (London and New York: Routledge, 2014, 1st ed. 1998), 91.
- 18.
Translating Knowledge in the Early Modern Low Countries, ed. Harold J. Cook and Sven Dupré (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2012), 6.
- 19.
See, for instance, Rothman, Brokering Empire and Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, Merchants & Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2002) and Simon Schaffer, The Brokered World: Go-betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009).
- 20.
Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 172.
- 21.
Pascale Casanova, ‘Consécration et accumulation de capital littéraire’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 144 (2002): 7–20, at 17.
- 22.
See at least David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
- 23.
See for instance Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans. Interpreting in the Middle East (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 24–28.
- 24.
Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), 14.
- 25.
Theo Hermans, ‘The Translator’s Voice in Translated Narrative’, Target 8 (1996): 23–48.
- 26.
Brian Harris, ‘Norms in Interpretation’, Target 2 (1990): 115–119, at 118.
- 27.
John Keane, Public Life and Late Capitalism. Towards a Socialist Theory of Democracy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 159. Source: Barbara A. Misztal, Trust in Modern Societies. The Search for the Bases of Social Order (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1996), 12.
- 28.
See Rosalind Edwards, Claire Alexander, and Bogusia Temple, ‘Interpreting Trust: Abstract and Personal Trust for People Who Need Interpreters to Access Services’, Sociological Research Online 11 (2006): http://www.socresonline.org.uk/11/1/edwards.html (accessed 14 July 2018). See also Nike K. Pokorn and Jaka Čibej, ‘“Do I Want to Learn a Language Spoken by Two Million People?”, Mediation Choices by Mid-Term and Long-Term Migrants’, Language Problems and Language Planning 42 (2018): 308–327.
- 29.
Denise M. Rousseau, Sim B. Sitkin, Ronald S. Burt, and Colin Camerer, ‘Not So Different After All: A Cross-Discipline View of Trust’, Academy of Management Review 23 (1998): 393–404, at 398. See also Guido Möllering, ‘The Nature of Trust: From Georg Simmel to a Theory of Expectation, Interpretation and Suspension’, Sociology 35 (2001): 403–420.
- 30.
Susan Reynolds, The Middle Ages without Feudalism. Essays in Criticism and Comparison on the Medieval West (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 8.
- 31.
Paolo Trovato, Con ogni diligenza corretto. La stampa e le revisioni editoriali dei testi letterari italiani (1470–1570) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991). See also Brian Richardson, ‘The Social Transmission of Translations in Renaissance Italy: Strategies of Dedication’, in Trust and Proof. Translators in Renaissance Print Culture, ed. Andrea Rizzi (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018), 13–32.
- 32.
Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), 9. In some of these representations, monkeys mimic or parody the first sinners, and they signify Adam and Eve’s becoming sinful and debased.
- 33.
Kenneth Gouwens, ‘Human Exceptionalism’ in The Renaissance World, ed. John J. Martin (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 415–434; Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 147–170; Sebastian Brandt, Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools) (Basel: Johan Bergmann, 1494), 108; and Horst W. Janson, Apes and Apes Lore (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1952), 227 (n21). On Renaissance imitatioiand translation see Frederick M. Rener, Interpretatio. Language and Translation from Cicero to Tytler (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1989), 293–317; Martin M. McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance. The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Tradition and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380–1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
- 34.
This passage is from Coindreau’s ‘Credo du traducteur’ published in L’express 1213 (1974): 74. The English translation is from http://culturesconnection.com/20-quotes-about-translation/ (accessed 10 October 2016).
- 35.
Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, trans. Varii (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 17.
- 36.
Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Cape, 1983), 104. See Jenni Ramone, Salman Rushdie and Translation (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 45–46.
- 37.
Robert of Kent, cited in Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny, ‘Deux traductions latines du Coran au Moyen Âge’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 16 (1947–1948): 69–131, at 80.
- 38.
David Samuel Margoliouth, Lectures on Arabic Historians (New York: Lenox Hill, 1972, 1st ed. 1930), 58.
- 39.
Theo Hermans, ‘Positioning Translators: Voices, Views, and Values in Translation’, Language and Literature 23 (2014): 285–301, at 299.
- 40.
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Translated from the German by James Strachey in Collaboration with Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974).
- 41.
Rothman, Brokering Empire. For evidence of trust in dragomans, see 186. For distrust, see 168.
- 42.
Hermans, ‘Positioning Translators’, 119.
- 43.
Sharon Deane-Cox, Retranslation: Translation, Literature and Reinterpretation (London: Bloomsbury Academics, 2014), 34 and 48.
- 44.
See, for example, Maria Teresa Turell, ‘Textual Kidnapping Revisited: The Case of Plagiarism in Literary Translation’, International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 11 (2004): https://journals.equinoxpub.com/index.php/IJSLL/article/view/536 (accessed 3 March 2019).
- 45.
Chuanmao Tian, ‘Effects of Government Policy on the Retranslation Boom in the 1990s Mainland China and Beyond’, International Journal of English Language and Culture 2 (2014): 12–17.
- 46.
Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (New York: Dover, 2004), II.1, 7: ‘The first [way of convincing the audience] depends upon the personal character of the speaker [ethos]; the second upon putting the audience into a certain frame of mind [pathos]; the third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself [logos]’. See Marie-Alice Belle, ‘Rhetorical Ethos and the Translating Self in Early Modern England’, in Trust and Proof. Translators in Renaissance Print Culture, ed. Andrea Rizzi (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018), 62–84, at 65–67.
- 47.
On the influence of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the development of early modern English prefatory epistle see Belle, ‘Rhetorical Ethos’.
- 48.
Susan Miller, Trust in Texts, 47.
- 49.
We use term ‘translatively’ from Anthony Pym, On Translation Ethics. Principles for Mediation between Cultures, trans. Heike Walker (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2012), 61. The presence of the translator’s voice in lexical and syntactic patterns has been studied by forensic linguistics, for example in deciding accusations of plagiarism in translation. See note 44.
- 50.
Birgit Lang, ‘Psychoanalysts through Translation: Julien (Johan) Varendonck (1879–1924)–Anna Freud (1895–1982)’, in Brussels: 1900: Vienna, ed. Piet Defraeye, Helga Mitterbauer, and Chris Reyns (Amsterdam: Brill, 2019).
- 51.
Juan Miguel Zarandona, ‘Amadis of Gaul (1803) and Chronicle of the Cid (1808) by Robert Southey. The Medieval History of Spain Translated’ in Charting the Future of Translation History, ed. Georges L. Bastin and Paul F. Bandia (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006), 309–332.
- 52.
Rebekah Clements, A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 168.
- 53.
Rothman, Brokering Empire, 263–264.
- 54.
Brenda Hosington, ‘Tudor Englishwomen’s Translations of Continental Protest Texts: The Interplay of Ideology and Historical Context’, in Tudor Translation, ed. Fred Schurink (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 121–142, at 133–135.
- 55.
Jean Taffin, Of the Markes of the Children of God, and of Their Comforts in Afflictions. To the Faithfull of the Low Countrie, trans. A. Locke (London, 1590), A4.
- 56.
Marc Bloch, Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe; Selected Papers (London and New York: Routledge, 2015, 1st ed. 1967), 46.
- 57.
Rothman, Brokering Empire, 166.
- 58.
Nappi, ‘Full. Empty. Stop’.
- 59.
Rothman, Brokering Empire, 169.
- 60.
Tommaso Garzoni, La piazza universal di tutte le professioni del mondo (Venice: Michiel Miloco, 1645, 1st ed. 1585), 349–350. See George McClure, The Culture of Profession in Late Renaissance Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004) which explores professional themes and the rhetoric of translation in early modern Italy.
- 61.
Jo Anne Brown, The Definition of a Profession. The Authority of Metaphor in the History of Intelligence Testing, 1890–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 19.
- 62.
Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London and New York: Routledge, 2008, 1st ed. 1995) and the response to Venuti’s work in Anne E. B. Coldiron ‘Visibility Now: Historicizing Foreign Presences in Translation’, Translation Studies 5 (2012): 189–200.
- 63.
We are grateful to Samira Saeedi for sharing with us her in progress doctoral research findings on translators in contemporary Iran. See also Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam, Literary Translation in Modern Iran. A Sociological Study (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2015).
- 64.
Anthony Pym and Grzegorz Chrupala, ‘The Quantitative Analysis of Translation Flows in the Age of an International Language’, in Less Translated Languages, ed. Albert Branchadell and Lovell Margaret West (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2004), 27–38.
- 65.
See Anthony Pym, ‘On the Social and the Cultural in Translation Studies’, in Sociocultural Aspects of Translating and Interpreting, ed. Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger, and Zuzana Jettmarová (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2006), 1–25, at 25. These observations also concern whether it is possible to regard translation as a ‘field’ in Bourdieu’s sense. When translators do assume publicly visible roles, they tend to enter into competition with each other and thus begin to satisfy the basic criteria for an activity to be considered a field.
- 66.
See Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 7: ‘The translator’s invisibility is thus a weird self-annihilation, a way of conceiving and practicing translation that undoubtedly reinforces its marginal status in British and American cultures’.
- 67.
The professional history of conference interpreting is comparatively short. As a profession it began at the end of WWI. See Jesús Baigorri-Jalón, From Paris to Nuremberg. The Birth of Conference Interpreting, trans. Holly Mikkelson and Barry Slaughter Olsen (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing, 2014). On the much longer history of non-professional, global history of diplomacy and interpreting see Ruth Roland, Interpreters as Diplomats. A Diplomatic History of the Role of Interpreters in World Politics (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1999). On the porous boundaries between native, natural, and trained translators and interpreters see Luis Pérez-Gonzalez and Sebnem Susam-Saraeva, ‘Non-professional Translating and Interpreting’, The Translator 18 (2012): 149–165.
- 68.
Andy L. J. Chan, ‘Why are Most Translators Underpaid?’, Translation Journal 9 (2005): http://www.translationjournal.net/journal/32asymmetric.htm (accessed 9 January 2019) and Kristiina Abdallah, ‘Translators’ Agency in Production Networks’, in Translators’ Agency, ed. Tujia Kinnunen and Kaisa Koskinen (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2010), 11–46.
- 69.
Emiko Okayama, ‘A Nagasaki Translator of Chinese and the Making of a New Literary Genre’, in Translation and Translation Studies in the Japanese Context, ed. Nana Sato-Rossberg and Judy Wakabayashi (London and New York: Continuum, 2012), 53–72, at 67. See also Rebekah Clemens, A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan, p. 175.
- 70.
Coldiron, ‘Visibility Now’, 191.
- 71.
ISO17100, Translation Services—Requirements for Translation Services (2015), https://www.iso.org/standard/59149.html (accessed 12 March 2019).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rizzi, A., Lang, B., Pym, A. (2019). On Relationality: Trusting Translators. In: What is Translation History?. Translation History. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20099-2_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20099-2_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-20098-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-20099-2
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)