Introduction: Science and Practices of Translation

Abstract

Historically speaking, scientists have lived and worked in a multilingual world. Given that, in 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.