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

With few exceptions, the history of science has so far shown little interest in translations. Not to put too fine a point on it, they have been seen as a marginal genre which does not contribute to the production of new knowledge and is therefore of subsidiary significance to the history of science. In this view, translations fulfil their purpose in service to the original, which they transfer from one language into another.

This lack of interest in scientific translations can be attributed, firstly, to the empirical–positivistic tradition of seeing science as a metalinguistic phenomenon that can claim universal comprehensibility unencumbered by factors related to language.¹ This was reinforced by the ‘mathematization of the cosmos’,² when mathematics became the universal language of the natural sciences, that is, a medium of communication that is equally accessible to all and therefore does not require translation. A second reason can be found in the lasting impact of two complementary methodological trends in the history of science, the practice turn and the object turn, and the opportunities that they opened up. Since then, science can be analysed as a sequence of learned and mundane practices, with a particular focus on the role of the objects involved in the process of doing science.³ This per se immensely productive widening of the perspective from the scientific result to the whole process of its creation and production has produced a methodological constellation in which interest in aspects of scientific textuality has decreased radically in favour of a lasting fascination with object-oriented approaches.

The aim of this special issue is to discuss the translation of science—mainly texts, but also images and other visual material—as a scientific practice whose functions and ambitions are by no means limited to transferring an original work from one language into another. To start with, general developments and a number of pioneering projects which can provide a frame of reference for the emergence of translation studies within the history of science will be discussed.⁴ Overall, a number of indicators suggest that a rehabilitation of the scientific text as a subject of study, or at least the practices and techniques of its production, is now overdue. For example, there is an increasing interest in the whole area of obtaining and processing information within various historical and disciplinary combinations, which, inspired by contemporary phenomena such as electronic data processing, information overload and data-driven science, concentrates on techniques of collecting, organizing, processing and sharing data.⁵ Ann Blair has discussed the strategies used by early modern scholars to organize information so that, despite its increasing quantity, specific pieces could be found and accessed when required. She focuses in particular on note-taking, how compilers worked, and the impact of reference books.⁶ Blair has also edited a special themed issue of the Intellectual History Review, published in 2010, on note-taking in early modern Europe, which contains contributions on, among other things, the notebooks of European travellers, forms of personal and institutional information management and data-sharing in the context of an emerging global vaccination network.⁷

So far, historians of science have focused only on a few instances of translation. Cases of transfer from West to East and vice versa have attracted attention, such as the translation of works from ancient Greek into Arabic in the eighth and ninth centuries, which A. I. Sabra has investigated under the headings of the ‘appropriation’ and ‘naturalization of science’.⁸ According to Sabra, translations are more than the movement of scientific texts, ideas and concepts through space and time; in the majority of cases, they also change these. He is interested in the process of the appropriation of science, an active movement of assimilating scientific contexts and texts driven by the specific needs and interests of the receiving culture, which he distinguishes from reception as a passive process. Closely correlated with this is the question of the role of translations in the framework of modernization processes. Looking at the transfer and transformation of texts between Europe and East Asia, a volume of essays edited by Lydia Liu, Tokens of Exchange, discusses translation as a process of negotiating ‘meaning-value’⁹ between languages, societies and cultures that oscillates between granting and withholding reciprocity. This approach takes account of asymmetries in the global circulation of knowledge, whether caused by colonial, cultural or other factors. In addition, it allows the translation of scientific texts and the resulting transformations to be presented as a generator of synchronous but differing modernities.¹⁰ A third key question relates to the significance of local factors shaping the translation and reception of scientific texts in specific cultural and intellectual settings. Nicolaas Rupke was the first to point out that on this essential point, translation studies within the history of science converge with approaches that localize the knowledge-production process and investigate it in respect of the material and intellectual resources concretely available in situ.¹¹ By analogy with this now widely accepted insight into the situatedness of scientific knowledge, Rupke stresses the situatedness of meaning, whose comparative analysis he and others see as a central task of translation studies.¹²

In conclusion, we turn to cultural studies, where translations and the practice of translation have recently undergone a spectacular metamorphosis from a subject of research into a research paradigm. Doris Bachmann-Medick has described the approaches which extract translating from its original language- and text-based reference system to use it as a category for grasping the phenomena of transaction and migration between cultures as the ‘translational turn’.¹³ With reference to Homi Bhabha,¹⁴ who, in turn, found inspiration in Walter Benjamin's classic essay ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’ (1923),¹⁵ ‘translation of culture’ is at present expanding into an almost universal paradigm, which aims to achieve an analysis of cultural difference informed by postcolonial studies, and to provide cultural techniques that, at the level of action, take account of this difference. Whether this can succeed, and at what point the translation metaphor will become overstrained and lose its specificity and meaning need not be decided here. But to consider translation as a practice of analysing, assimilating, and affirming cultural difference can, in any case, offer inspiration to translation studies within the history of science. All the more so as these deliberations on the navigation of cultural differences converge with the history of science's lasting interest in the mobility and circulation of objects, individuals, and concepts between various, often disparate, sites of doing science.¹⁶

The contributions to this special issue explore further dimensions of translating science in the context of questions, such as: what are the functions of translating science in various historical and cultural settings, and what purposes does it serve? What translational strategies are used, and what effect do they have, also in relation to the translation of non-verbal documents (illustrations, graphs, etc.)? Going beyond the text, what material aspects of the translation process, such as the acquisition and transport of books, for example, deserve attention? What factors determine whether scientific terms, concepts or whole epistemic systems are translatable or not? Who translates—an individual or a collective? men, women or machines?—for what target group, and what does this say about the status of translating? And finally, what role did translations play as a tool of scientific communication? What can they tell us about the use and status of languages within a local, regional or global communications system? How can they be integrated into the history of scientific publishing?

The article by Patrice Bret looks at two collectively organized projects from the second half of the eighteenth century, whose purpose was to translate the most recent publications in mineralogy and chemistry from various European languages, particulary German and Swedish, into French. The decline of Latin as the universal language of science and the increasing use of national languages threatened to cut off the majority of French scientists from the most recent findings of an expanding discipline. The translation of articles published in the periodicals of learned societies and academies of science in the rest of Europe was intended to provide a remedy. Bret discusses the working methods and logistics of the Bureau de traduction de Dijon, without reducing translating to linguistic work on a text. He also addresses the material process of obtaining texts as well as the fact that the translators used a laboratory set up by the academy in Dijon to give an interested public practical demonstrations of some of the experiments they were translating, or, where appropriate, to verify them.

Bettina Dietz discusses translations of Carl Linnaeus' Systema naturae into various European languages in the framework of consecutively published, expanded new editions of his systematic writings. Translations not only made the Systema, the central register of the botanical record, available to botanists and amateurs who did not know Latin, but also drove forward the long-term project of completing and correcting it. On the one hand, it was the translators who, depending on the envisaged target group, made their own additions, thus producing versions of the Systema for practical use with an information profile tailored to specific needs. On the other hand, the more practitioners were recruited for Linnaean botany, the more plants could be ‘recruited’ into the system. As in the course of this process countless additions, corrections and references had to be incorporated, techniques of textual montage were developed and refined to engineer the non-linear growth of the Systema, whose modular architecture not only permitted expansion, but demanded it.

Comparing two translations of François Levaillant's Voyage dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique into English, one by an anonymous translator and the other by the writer Elizabeth Helme, Alison Martin analyses the scope and limits of the agency of women as translators of scientific travel writing. Although women increasingly featured as translators of scientific literature in the second half of the eighteenth century, they tended to concentrate on themes such as botany, both educational and decorative, that were considered suitable for the female sex. The range of content in a scientific travel report, by contrast, posed a challenge to a female translator, especially if she published under her own name. The omission of potentially provocative ethnographic passages and the cutting of ornithological descriptions on the one hand, and stylistic elegance on the other were among the strategies which allowed Elizabeth Helme's translation to reach a wide audience without excluding specialists.

Based on an unusual case study, Yulia Frumer's contribution undermines the seemingly obvious assumption that translators in general, and translators of scientific literature in particular, have a clear understanding of the text to be translated from the start. Using the notes left by a Japanese astronomer, Takahashi Yoshitoki (1764–1804), she reconstructs the protracted and complicated process by which he read Joseph Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande's Astronomie translated into Dutch, a language which, apart from a few words, he did not understand. Despite this, and the fact that the work's methodology was new to him, Yoshitoki was able to extract some at least fragmentary sense from it. His understanding was the result of laborious but ultimately successful attempts to decipher, step by step, the non-verbal elements of the book, such as diagrams, graphs, etc., using categories and procedures that he was already familiar with.

With a focus on the publication strategies of the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779–1848), Jenny Beckman addresses scientific translations within the broader framework of a history of scientific publishing and communication. After Latin gradually lost its status as the lingua franca of European science towards the end of the eighteenth century, the publication of research results, especially in smaller European languages, required fundamental strategic decisions. For example, how could a decision to publish in Swedish – a language that was hardly spoken outside the country – be reconciled with the ambition for Swedish research to be read and cited in other European countries? And in the case of competing publications in a number of languages, how could priority claims be asserted? Linguistic border lines running through Europe's scientific publication landscape required creative strategies of plurilingualism.

In conclusion, Michael Gordin discusses the rise and (temporary) fall of machine translation in the context of the Cold War. His starting point is a spectacular, pioneering American experiment dating from 1954, which made machine translation from Russian into English appear to be a potential secret weapon for the purpose of intelligence gathering. The Georgetown-IBM Experiment concentrated explicitly on scientific Russian, which, because it was less complex than the literary language, could more easily be translated with the help of algorithms. In the period that followed, a machine translation boom gripped the USA and Russia. It was followed by abrupt disillusionment around 1960, when it became apparent that linguistically adequate translations of complex scientific texts could not be achieved by these means.

Despite the seductive utopia of machine translation and the rise of English into a new scientific lingua franca, multilingual scientists, especially in the humanities, are still an irreplaceable guarantee for the mutual reception of various scientific discourses which differ not only in language, but also, often considerably, in their traditions and techniques of argument. This special issue seeks to contribute to the beginning discussion of the use and status of languages in global scientific communication.¹⁷

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.