Introduction: Special Issue ‘Translating and translations in the history of science’

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Notes

¹See also Marwa S. Elshakry, ‘Knowledge in Motion: The Cultural Politics of Modern Science Translations in Arabic’, Isis, 99 (2008), 701–30 (703); Marwa S. Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950 (Chicago, 2014).

²See Alexandre Koyré, ‘The Significance of the Newtonian Synthesis’, in Newtonian Studies, ed. by Alexandre Koyré (Cambridge, MA, 1965), pp. 3–24.

³On this see the following selection: Andrew Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago, 1992); Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago, 1995); Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Towards a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford, 1997); Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Epistemologie des Konkreten: Studien zur Geschichte der modernen Biologie (Frankfurt am Main, 2006); Theodore Schatzki and Karin Knorr Cetina (eds.), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (London and New York, 2001); Lorraine Daston (ed.), Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York, 2004); on collaborative scientific practice see Bettina Dietz, ‘Contribution and Co-production: The Collaborative Culture of Linnaean Botany’, Annals of Science, 69 (2012), 551–69; see also Léna Soler, E. Trizio et al. (eds.), Characterizing the Robustness of Science: After the Practice Turn in Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht, 2012).

⁴In the last twenty years, translation studies has established itself as a discipline both methodologically and institutionally. For orientation see Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader (2nd edn. New York, 2004); Lawrence Venuti, Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice (New York, 2012); Michaela Wolf and Alexandra Fukari (eds.), Constructing a Sociology of Translation (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 2007). The first collections of essays on scientific translations are Pascal Duris (ed.), Traduire la science: Hier et aujourd'hui (Pessac, 2008); from the perspective of translation studies Maeve Olohan and Myriam Salama-Carr (eds.), Translating Science, special issue, The Translator, 17 (2011); see also Harold J. Cook and Sven Dupré (eds.), Translating Knowledge in the Early Modern Low Countries (Münster, 2013); Patrice Bret and Jeanne Peiffer (eds.), La traduction comme dispositif de communication dans l'Europe moderne (forthcoming).

⁵See e.g. Daniel Rosenberg (ed.), Early Modern Information Overload, special issue, Journal for the History of Ideas, 67 (2003); on the epistemological consequences of data overload in twentieth-century bio-medical sciences see Bruno Strasser, ‘The Experimenter's Museum: GenBank, Natural History, and the Moral Economies of Biomedicine, 1979–1982’, Isis, 102 (2011), 60–96; Bruno Strasser, ‘Data-driven Sciences: From Wonder Cabinets to Electronic Databases’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 43 (2012), 85–7.

⁶See Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven and London, 2010); and earlier, Helmut Zedelmeier and Martin Mulsow (eds.), Praktiken der Gelehrsamkeit in der Frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen, 2001).

⁷See Ann Blair (ed.), Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe, special issue, Intellectual History Review, 20/3 (2010); in this, e.g. Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, ‘A Portable World: The Notebooks of European Travellers (Eighteenth to Nineteenth Centuries)’, Intellectual History Review, 20/3 (2010), 377–400; Margaret Sankey, ‘Writing the Voyage of Scientific Exploration: The Logbooks, Journals, and Notes of the Baudin Expedition (1800–1804)’, Intellectual History Review, 20/3 (2010), 401–13; Jacob Soll, ‘From Note-Taking to Data Banks: Personal and Institutional Information Management in Early Modern Europe’, Intellectual History Review, 20/3 (2010), 355–75; Michael Bennett, ‘Note-Taking and Data-Sharing: Edward Jenner and the Global Vaccination Network’, Intellectual History Review, 20/3 (2010), 415–32.

⁸A. I. Sabra, ‘The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Science in Medieval Islam: A Preliminary Statement’, History of Science, 25 (1987), 223–243 ; see also F. Jamil Ragep and Sally P. Ragep (eds.), Tradition, Transmission, Transformation: Proceedings of two Conferences on Pre-Modern Science Held at the University of Oklahoma (Leiden, New York and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1996).

⁹Lydia H. Liu (ed.), Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (Durham and London, 1999), p. 2 (science is one of several subject areas discussed).

¹⁰On translation as an agent of modernization see also David Wright, Translating Science: The Transmission of Western Chemistry into Late Imperial China, 1840–1900 (Leiden and Boston, 2000); for work in progress see the programme of the conference ‘Translation and Modernization in East Asia in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century’, held in May 2013 at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, online at http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/rct/ts/modern [accessed 13 September 2013]; from the perspective of literary theory Theresa Hyun and Jose Lambert (eds.), Translation and Modernization (Tokyo, 1995); and Omid Azadibougar, ‘Translation Historiography in the Modern World: Modernization and Translation into Persian’, Target, 22 (2010), 298–329.

¹¹See Nicolaas Rupke, ‘Translation Studies in the History of Science: The Example of the “Vestiges” ’, British Journal for the History of Science, 33 (2000), 209–22.

¹²See ibid., 210. Marwa Elshakry discusses, for example, the significance of local factors in controversies about the adequacy or inadequacy of translations of Western scientific terms into modern Arabic; see Elshakry, ‘Knowledge’ (note 1); cf. also Scott L. Montgomery, Science in Translation: Movements of Knowledge through Cultures and Time (Chicago, 2000).

¹³See Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften (Reinbek, 2006); Doris Bachmann-Medick, ‘The Translational Turn’, in Handbook of Translation, vol. 4, ed. by Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer (Amsterdam, 2013), pp. 186–93; Doris Bachmann-Medick (ed.), The Trans/National Study of Culture: A Translational Perspective (Berlin and Boston, 2014).

¹⁴Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), ch. 11: ‘How Newness Enters the World'. See also Birgit Wagner, ‘Kulturelle Übersetzung: Erkundungen über ein wanderndes Konzept’, online at http://www.kakanien.ac.at/beitr/postcol/bwagner2.pdf [accessed 10 June 2014].

¹⁵Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: Tableaux Parisiens, trans. into German with a Foreword by the translator (Heidelberg, 1923).

¹⁶A selection: Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (eds.), Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia, 2005); Bettina Dietz, ‘Mobile Objects: The Space of Shells in Eighteenth-Century France’, British Journal for the History of Science, 39 (2006), 363–82; Harold Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven and London, 2007); Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke and New York, 2007); Kapil Raj (with Mary Terrall), Circulation and Locality in Early Modern Science, special issue, British Journal for the History of Science, 43 (2010).

¹⁷See Michael Gordin, Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English (Chicago, 2015); on monolinguistic versus plurilinguistic regimes of scientific communication see id., ‘Science once communicated in a polyglot of tongues, but now English rules alone. How did this happen – and at what cost?’, Aeon Magazine, http://aeon.co/magazine/science/how-did-science-come-to-speak-only-english [accessed 9 July 2015]. Gordin reduces the costs of this development to the time which non-Anglophone scientists have to spend learning English. But is this really all? Does not multilingualism in scientific communication, especially in the humanities, guarantee a conceptual and intellectual diversity that a monolinguistic system cannot provide? And how does the dominance of English affect the willingness of English and non-English scientists – in this case historians – to learn other languages? How can we be sure that historical phenomena are adequately represented and interpreted if non-English sources can be read by fewer and fewer historians, and publications by those who work in other languages and often write in them, are hardly noticed, if at all, in the Anglophone publishing system. A discussion of institutional and individual strategies of plurilingualism is overdue.