Dupré, Lehoux, Montgomery, Küçük, Frumer, Vermij, Kursell (2018)

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 the Ottoman Empire to Japan and from antiquity to the nineteenth century.

• For Sarton, an Arabist as well as a foundational figure of our discipline, the idea of translation was crucial to his understanding of the history of science, which he saw primarily as a series of translation movements and cross-cultural intellectual contacts between civilizations across the world.

• One typical context in the early modern period is that of the encounter with local plants and plant names, particularly outside Europe. Travelers were confronted with a plethora of unknown names, terms, and concepts. Structurally similar to the processes of naming in the encounter with indigenous, non-European plants is the invention of vocabulary in the context of the artisanal workshop and the appropriation of this terminology in print and translation when no equivalent in Latin or the vernaculars existed—what I have called “the translation of artisanal knowledge.” The expansion of the domain of science meant a consequent expansion of vocabulary.

• This work has complicated the issue of language. What is a language? And if a language is not static, with well-defined borders with respect to other languages, how should we think about translation as a transfer from one language into another? Here, translations are also translations between spaces of expertise. Therefore, it might be useful to consider the issue of translation in the context of “trading zones,” [...].

• In early modern Europe, the naming of plants was a complex process only rarely involving straightforward translation. The more typical situation was that of inventing a name by combining the local vernacular with a description in Latin or one of the vernaculars.

• Following the seminal work on the cultural history of translation initiated by Peter Burke, the discussion has shifted toward the variety of practices of translation. Instead of asking (only) about the “fidelity” or “faithfulness” of a translation (considered as a copy of an original), historians have become interested in questions such as, For whom did they translate? Why did they translate? And how did they translate? In response to the question of the identity of translators, Burke himself has noted the significant percentage of translators who were, as immigrants, perfectly suited to serve as go-betweens. The literary historian Theo Hermans has outlined the vigorous early modern debate on the status of translators with respect to the authors of translated texts—with authors and translators arguing for different positions.19 When was the translator named in the translated text? Under what conditions was he named as the translator, the coauthor, or even the only author—masking the original author? The study of the identity of translators can help historians of science to understand translators’ roles in bringing together disparate and seemingly incommensurable worlds—and see how knowledge is transformed in this process.

• Whatever the precise outcomes, the contributions to this Focus section do not look at these processes of translation as betrayals of the original—that is, as less successful replicas—but as processes productive of knowledge that are part and parcel of the history of science.

Lehoux (2018) - Science into Latin.

• Abstract: Scientific writing initially came to ancient Latin speakers as a foreign discipline. Greek-language sources, in the form both of written texts and of living speakers, brought a wide range of philosophical, technical, and scientific material to their Latin neighbors from at least the second century B.C.E. The challenge for the Romans, though, was not just one of translating individual texts—of turning Plato’s Timaeus into Latin, for example. Instead, Romans worried and openly reflected on the broader question of what this essay calls discourse translation: Was it possible—at all—even to do philosophy in Latin?

• The scientific name for the great white shark is Carcharodon carcharias. This, amusingly, translates as something like “sawtoothed sawtoothy-shark.” While it may lack the majesty of the Tyrannosaurus rex’s “king king-lizard,” the name certainly does capture a prominent feature of the great white. Another difference between the two names is that when Linnaeus coined C. carcharias, the shark already had a vernacular name. By contrast, the T. rex’s name had to be invented in a vacuum, the scientific then becoming the vernacular. Nevertheless, the absence of a vernacular for T. rex was not a complete absence of names, for what Henry Fairfield Osborn did was to call up ready-to-hand Greek and Latin words from which he produced a new designation. The roots were there, but not yet as the name of an animal. 

• The example points to some of the problems faced by the first translators of scientific and philosophical material from Greek into Latin (Cicero, Lucretius, and others): not all of the words were there yet in the target language. Greeks had been arguing about how the world worked, what it was made of, and why it was the way it was for several centuries before we have any record of Latin speakers becoming interested in joining those conversations. Elaborate technical vocabularies had evolved in Greek, in everything from ethics to astronomy. Latin had none of this linguistic infill at first, and decisions had to be made about how to remedy the gap. And of course translation is not usually just a process of turning foreign words into domestic ones. The translator also has to think about what he is trying to achieve with a translation, how to manage linguistic nuances, wordplay, and so much more. For educated Romans, though, these questions emerged not just in the context of what I will call textual translation, by which I mean the familiar act of bringing some specific text more or less faithfully from one language into another, but in the context of what we might call discourse translation, the much bigger project of taking a whole discipline that had only ever been spoken and written about in one language, Greek, and trying to engage with it productively in another, Latin. For the Romans, natural philosophy had simply never been done in their language before, and it wasn’t obvious to them whether it could be—or indeed whether it even needed to be. After all, cultured Romans were (supposed to be) able to read and speak Greek, so what was the point? Whom was it for? The issue of discourse translation is doubly interesting in this case, because the early attempts to do natural philosophy in Latin may be the first time in the history of the sciences that the question was actually raised as to whether the act of translation itself was possible or even desirable. Yes, divinatory, medical, astronomical, and calendrical knowledge seems to have moved freely between ancient cultures and languages before the Roman period. But in the Latin project we see an active and direct engagement with the issue of the possibility of translation. The question was simply this: Could you do philosophy—natural or otherwise— in Latin?

• Lucrécio reafirmava a pobreza do vocabulário latino, dificultando a tradução de obras gregas, enquanto Cícero afirmava que não havia nada de errado em neologismos para conceitos que não tinham equivalente me latim.

• Aulus Gellius might think that Latin translations paled in comparison to Greek, but the translators of Greek science disagreed, seeing the engagement with natural philosophy as not only possible in their own language but very strongly desirable. Fluency in Greek may have been an important part of the educated Roman self-image, but, as Cicero observed, this was sometimes more honored in the breach.12 And in any case, at a time of great political upheaval, just as the old republican system of government was disintegrating, the projects undertaken by Cicero and Lucretius to bring the best of Greek philosophy into Latin had everything to do with establishing a new kind of Roman self-image, one that actively cultivated political virtue over financial gain. The fact that both of their ethical theories were rooted in conceptions of nature as lawlike meant that natural philosophy was an important part of those projects. That it could be done in Latin they wanted to prove. That it should they had no doubt.

Montgomery (2018) - Arabic translation era.

• Abstract: Scientific knowledge is transferred, or mobilized, between cultures through the process of translation. One of the largest episodes of such transfer took place between the eighth and the eleventh centuries during the Abbasid Caliphate. Four sources of scientific knowledge were brought into the Arabic language: Greek (Byzantium), Syriac (Eastern Christian cities), Pahlavia (Persia), and Sanskrit (India). The focus was on Greek science, mathematics, and medicine, along with Aristotelian philosophy, with translation supported by the caliphs and much of urban society. Motives were complex and multifold, related to ideas of utility, political consolidation, and building a superior society. Results of the translation movement varied enormously and are sometimes difficult to characterize, combining material from several or more generations and languages. Certain texts of huge influence cast serious doubt on modern ideas about translation, its process, and its products. Important questions emerge, not only about what may be lost and gained in any translation activity but about how to conceive the profound role of this activity in the larger history of science.

• If knowledge may be considered a mobile form of culture, then science has surely been among its more peripatetic children. Scientific knowledge has often been mobilized by the work of translators, who therefore appear to be essential, if often invisible, agents in the sharing and growth of such knowledge. Those who labor today in the vales of science translation rarely view themselves in such a light. Yet only a slight shift in perspective is needed to see them as part of a vast transfer of valued material around the globe. Extending this picture over decades, it becomes evident that enormous amounts of knowledge can be moved between languages and cultures.

• We might ask, then, What boundaries or standards were adopted to keep the translated versions of so many books loyal to their originals and therefore accountable? The answer is simple: none. No more than in literary translation, there have never been any recognized standards when it comes to translating scientific material, a fact excellently demonstrated during the Abbasid period.

• Even from these brief comments it is evident that “translation” counts as a rather weak and inadequate term to describe what actually took place. Mobilizing the knowledge of Greek, Syriac, Persian, and Hindu science and medicine employed a multitude of processes, ranging from direct and indirect translation—that is, translation from an original source or from a rendering of it in another language—to the partial or entire rewriting of a source. Even such a span fails to capture the striking diversity of methods, several of which were very often in play for any single work. Historians might therefore be forgiven for finding it unexpected that the transfer of nature knowledge was every bit as variable, complex, and culturally bound as the “translation” of literary or religious works.

• What this suggests, first of all, is that the standard model of translation—a process whereby a quantity of text produced in one language is transferred into a second language, with approximately the same content and amount of text—is in many cases seriously flawed, even irrelevant. Another, related implication is that the very idea of an “original” may not hold or do us any good. Mankiya was given the task of translating an ancient work, the Sushruta Samhita, a work of poetry created by an oral tradition of unknown (but truly ancient) age, finally committed to writing around 400 B.C., but then copied and undoubtedly altered over the next thousand years. It was then partially transferred into a new language in the form of prose, with deletions and additions both. In what sense can we apply the common designations “source text” and “translated text” here?

• Thus we are provided with a concrete declaration of the freedom translators felt might be necessary to produce a useful work in Arabic—a work, moreover, that would be and act more as an “original” than as a text of Ptolemy seven hundred years removed from its first inscription. Viewing such a rendering as a new original might seem to help settle the many questions raised by Thabit’s remarkable words—nearly every kind of alteration is permissible if the goal is to create an altogether new work, though we might still attach an older name, “Ptolemy,” to it. We recognize that this name is really a partial mask, since the knowledge in the text still belongs to the first author, without whom the new work would never have been created. 

• But this is not the end. Accepting this path of understanding actually leads to the windy edge of a sharp, even disturbing, precipice. Is it, in fact, the same knowledge that emerges in the new text? Is it the same science? With all the changes that might have been decided upon by the translator-creator, from material deleted and commentary added to corrections made and organization changed, has it been altered in some essential way? How much does science depend on the language in which it occurs? Does the name “Ptolemy” stand not as a mask but, rather, as the title of a collection of works in different languages, with significantly different contents? In the end, talking about the historical details of science and translation thus takes us into matters of epistemology and linguistic philosophy. Nearly every translator of scientific material today sooner or later, in her or his own way, when looking at and reflecting on the fruits of her or his labor, comes to wonder: What have I done?

Küçük (2018) - Arabic into Turkish.

• Abstract: Early modern Turkish was a miscellaneous language that borrowed not only words but also whole phrases and verses from Arabic and Persian. While the language was a miscellany, there nevertheless was considerable uniformity in the kinds of natural knowledge that made it to Turkish: almost everything pertained to a type of practice, like the making of drugs and almanacs, and there was almost nothing in the way of theory. While looking at translations often gives us a story about connection, Turkish translations from Arabic also point out a disjunction between the science done in the Arabic speaking and the Turkish-speaking domains of the Ottoman Empire. The selection of the translations from Arabic in the seventeenth century points us to the governing value that made Turkish-language science so uniform: commonweal or nef ’i-yi e’amm.

Frumer (2018) - Dutch thermometers in Japanese and Chinese. 

• Tradução como construção de mundos.

• Abstract: Translations between languages that are grammatically and culturally distant reveal that translated texts are not the source but, rather, the result of an already ongoing process of conceptual transformation. Looking at the processes behind early nineteenth-century Japanese translations of Dutch works on barometers and thermometers, this essay argues that a translator’s task is first and foremost to construct a conceptual world that makes space for radically different forms of knowledge. The essay explores the processes that occur before the appearance of textual translation by tracing Japanese translators’ attempts to interpret foreign devices according to a worldview rooted in Chinese natural philosophy, as well as their experimentation with devices and their exploration of European concepts described in Jesuit writings in Classical Chinese. The essay argues that these processes brought about changes to the conceptual world of early nineteenth-century Japan and subsequently transformed the Japanese and Chinese languages.

• Scientific translations between languages rooted in conceptually different worldviews reveal the fact that written translations are not the source but, rather, the result of an already ongoing process of learning. When a translator cannot assume the existence of similar assumptions in the target language, simply designating a new term is not enough to render foreign ideas meaningful. Instead, one must situate foreign terms in familiar practices, objects, and theories. When meanings associated with a foreign term lie completely outside the conceptual world of the target language, the task of the translator is to articulate a conceptual world that has a place for the new meanings.

• Sajūrō’s work is notable not for the sentences he was able to translate literally and “get right,” but for the commentary with which he annotated the text. It was with this commentary that Sajūrō articulated a conceptual world in which barometers, thermometers, “air pressure,” and “void” made sense. Tradução por definição e contextualização.

• Looking at translations between distant languages and cultures exposes the complexities of the cognitive processes that often go unnoticed when translating between languages that have grammatical and semantic commonalities. Japanese translators who attempted to translate treatises n barometers and thermometers from Dutch first had to make sense of the foreign devices in terms of familiar practices and concepts. They then had to experiment with those devices and experience the processes of using them to take measurements; translators had to rely on mediation by culturally closer Classical Chinese texts that offered some explanations of Western concepts, themselves already mediated by Jesuits active in China; and they had to learn Western sciences to situate foreign concepts among the metaphors and assumptions embedded in those concepts in Dutch. In so doing, translators gradually but substantively altered their own associations with weather-related practices, building a whole new world of interlinked concepts that together expressed the added value of foreign texts. Far from marking the beginning of the process of knowledge transfer, formal translations, therefore, captured the already ongoing processes by means of which foreign concepts were integrated into the existing conceptual fabric, impregnated with linguistic and cultural associations, and made intelligible to the local reader.

Vermij (2018) - Translating, Adapting, Mutilating: Or, How to Make an Enlightenment Classic

• Abstract: This essay discusses the European reception of Bernard Nieuwentijt’s physico-theology. Originally published in Dutch in 1715, his book was quickly translated into English (The Religious Philosopher) and from there into French (L’existence de Dieu); a German translation later followed. The book became one of the landmark titles of the eighteenth century. However, the translators made severe cuts in the text, sometimes to the point of completely changing the original message. In doing so, they contributed to the creation of a mainstream Enlightenment culture, whereas Nieuwentijt himself had reacted to the specific circumstances in the Dutch Republic.

• In the early modern period, after the introduction of the printing press, publishing became a mass medium. On the one hand, print was seized upon by political and religious authorities to convey their message to a wider audience. On the other hand, it was an industry dominated by commercial interests. Whereas medieval authors (including translators) typically addressed a specific patron or a small group of scholars, in the early modern period they worked for an anonymous market. This called for new strategies. Translators had to make the text relevant to their readers, not just understandable. In doing so, their agenda was not always in agreement with that of the original author. Peter Burke has ventured the hypothesis that whereas in the Middle Ages translators preferred to translate word for word, the early modern translation regime demanded a much freer approach to the text. Only after 1800, according to Burke, did adherence to the original intentions of the author become a guiding principle.

• Omitting these passages affected the core of Nieuwentijt’s message. All his efforts had been focused on convincing atheists and unbelievers of the traditional Christian God. In Chamberlayne’s adaptation, God is reduced to the great watchmaker. The book thereby became just another example of the English version of physico-theology. It had some impact on English experimental philosophy. Some of Nieuwentijt’s experiments were repeated at the Royal Society by Desaguliers, the curator of experiments, and his arguments about the nature of fire appear to have been very influential in Britain. It does not appear, however, that the book contributed to any debates in the English Church.

• No livro original de Nieuwentijt há a primeira descrição de deus como um relojoeiro, aproveitada depois por Paley.

• The abridgments and adaptations in the various editions were introduced to make the book clearer and more readable, not willfully to distort its message. The religious tenor was definitely important to Chamberlayne and Segner. They left plenty of passages designed to edify readers in the text, including a chapter on the possibility of the Resurrection and Nieuwentijt’s argument that the motion of the Earth (or Sun) remained unproven. Most interestingly, Chamberlayne appears really to have appreciated Nieuwentijt’s arguments for the divinity of Holy Scripture. If in the end he omitted them, it was because he felt that they were unconvincing or not in line with common understanding, not because they were wrong in themselves.

Kursell (2018) - Ellis translating Helmholtz

• Abstract: This essay relocates Alexander J. Ellis’s translation of Hermann von Helmholtz’s book Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologischeGrundlage für die Theorie der Musik (1863) in a broader context. It discussesEllis’s various endeavors to make knowledge available to those with limited access to it and, more specifically, his attempts at making the sound of speech accessible to readers of printed text. Against this background, the essay then compares the central notion of tone sensation in Helmholtz’s book to Ellis’s rendition thereof. As will be seen, Ellis preferred familiarity to literal translation, but he also made great efforts to convey the quality of speech sounds where these became the object of investigation. This double strategy—which was not in line withHelmholtz’s forging of anew theory of perception through defamiliarizing common terms—forced Ellis into exuberant explanations that eventually overgrew the carefully transmitted original, resulting in what amounted to a book of his own.

• There are many reasons why a literal interpretation of Helmholtz’s text was difficult. Not only did some of the terms he used not exist in English, but in fact their use in the German original was deliberately awkward. The new definitions were meant to prevent the reader from falling back on the familiar context of music. Ellis acknowledged the aim of avoiding common notions in Helmholtz’s definitions. Yet he did not deem it a good idea to imitate the German terms for this reason. Instead, he intended to “employ terms which should be thoroughly English, and should not in any way recall the German words.” Comparing his own choices to those of John Tyndall, who had written an introduction to the study of sound that was based on Helmholtz’s work, Ellis dismissed the translation of “Ton” as merely “tone” without adding the qualifier “simple” and the translation of “Klang” as “clang” because of the connotations of clashing metal in expressions like “the clang of arms.” These sounds contained inharmonic components and therefore were inappropriate for denoting periodic sound.

• At first glance, Ellis’s options resemble a choice between, say, the poetics of translation in Alexander Pope and August Schleiermacher’s work translating ancient Greek. Pope hoped to find the “just pitch” of Homer’s style in doing justice to the effects his poetry achieved with no words other than those common at his time. Half a century later, and in the context of translating Plato into German, Schleiermacher emphasized that the foreign language will and should always remain foreign. Although one aspect of Ellis’s translation practice is certainly that he addressed the common sense of his readers and therefore avoided words with awkward connotations, another aspect is no less important for his modus operandi as a translator.

• English pronunciation is characterized by particularly great differences among speakers: any utterance immediately betrays the speaker’s provenance. Such concerns, which George Bernard Shaw later hypostasized in the figure of Professor Higgins in his play Pygmalion, led Ellis to search for a way of notating sounds that would avoid ambiguity. The translation of Helmholtz’s study of hearing opened up another area in which the accessibility of sound could be improved. Yet the central notion of sensation of tone only confirmed the problematic issue. To guarantee accessibility, a description of a sound always had to do more than just find the best sign to denote it. Helmholtz’s idea to capitalize on the systemic effect of vowel pronunciation worked well in a language whose alphabet supported unambiguous reference. Ellis, however, had to make considerable extra efforts to retain consistency while achieving a similar rhetorical effect. His strategy was to supply explanation and context that made up for the lack of directly congruent terms. His translation eventually amounted to a second book: Helmholtz on hearing was complemented by Ellis on Helmholtz, music, and language.