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ARTIGOS DA SEÇÃO FOCUS DA REVISTA ISIS, V. 109, N. 4 (2018). Cohen (2018) - Historians of science translating history of science. Too often have I found, on checking available translations into English of texts written in Dutch or in various other languages, how sloppily some of these had been executed. Entire interpretations have been based on translations that you just cannot rely on without closer attention, and it seemed important to me to call Isis readers’ attention to the vital importance that matters of language and, in particular, of translation possess for us historians. Guerrini (2018) - Translation as a way of life Abstract: Historians who work with materials in languages other than their own inevitably do quite a bit of translation in the course of their research and writing. Much of this consists of words, phrases, or sentences, and much remains unpublished. This essay looks at the author’s experiences with this sort of translation as well as with more fo...

ARTIGOS DA SEÇÃO FOCUS DO V. 109, N. 2 DA ISIS. Dupré (2018) - Science and practice of translations Abstract: Historically speaking, scientists have lived and worked in a multilingual world. Given that, on such a world, translation is simply part of (scientific) life, it is all the more remarkable that practices of translation in science have received less attention from historians of science than one might expect. A focus on translation allows historians of science to scrutinize the changes and transformations of scientific knowledge in motion. Instead of presuming that processes of translation are betrayals of the original, and thus asking about the “fidelity” of a translator or the “faithfulness” of a translation, the contributions to this Focus section see those processes as productive of knowledge, part and parcel of the history of science. This Focus section brings together a wide variety of languages and practices of translation in different places and times, from ...

ARTIGOS DA SEÇÃO FOCUS DO V. 108, N. 3 DA ISIS. Gordin (2017) -  Introduction: Hegemonic Languages  and Science Abstract: Science has historically been a multilingual enterprise, yet the present day appears to belie this generalization. It is difficult to deny the observation that the natural sciences today have converged to a state where a particular form of English—variously termed “Global English,” “International English,” or “English as a Lingua Franca”— serves as the almost universal language of interaction among scientific practitioners.The history of science demonstrates that many other languages have served (and, in many contexts, still do) for scientific and scholarly interchange. The unusual feature about the past several decades is not that the dominant language of the natural sciences is English (as opposed to, say, German or Russian or Chinese) but that it is a single language. This Focus section seeks to open up avenues of inquiry that would put both th...