Translationes

 

CALL FOR PAPERS

 

Translationes

 

7 (2015)

 

Stages of the History of Translation

 

As far back as 1958, Andrei V. Fedorov [1] emphasised the importance of the history of translation for the process of establishing a theory of translation. Seven years later, Georges Mounin deplored the absence of such a history and claimed that it should belong next to the history of music, painting or literature; at the same time, he recognised what a monumental task putting together such a work would be, given the enormous amount of information millennia of translating have yielded [2] . It has been fifty years since and remarkable progress has been made in the field of the history of translation thanks to the works of G. Steiner [3] , F. Rener [4] , H. van Hoof [5] , M. Ballard [6] , J. Delisle [7] , L. Venuti [8] , A. Pym [9] , to mention only a few names of historians of translation from the West.

The history of translation has become an academic subject and the topic of several international conferences, stirring a growing interest among researchers from the humanities, perhaps due to the increasing popularity of interdisciplinarity. It would, therefore, be timely to examine this discipline’s past and present in order to identify possible directions for future development. This is the reason why the seventh issue of Translationes will be dedicated to the history of translation, one of our aims being to identify the stages it has gone through to become a science, from the sporadic interest of the 1960s and 1970s, to the publication of several seminal works in the 1990s and its establishment as an essential branch of translation studies in the past ten years, in correlation with the professionalization of the figure of the historian of translation within certain university study programmes.

This issue focuses on various methodological, cultural and ideological aspects:

 

·  Historiography of translation

The scientific and deontological aspects regarding the ways of writing the history of translation outlined by Jean Delisle in “Réflexions sur l’historiographie de la traduction et ses exigences scientifiques” [10] , aspects which can be analysed both from a descriptive and a prescriptive perspective, are still relevant; their re-examination could help to establish how necessary it is to implement certain research methods, as well as to determine the positive and negative consequences of applying certain normative principles to the study of the history of translation.

·  Interdisciplinarity of the history of translation

Submitted articles could analyse the relations established between the history of translation and disciplines from various other fields, such as linguistics, literature, and translation studies. This line of investigation aims to identify the motivation and then the consequences of introducing the history of translation into university study programmes.

·  The deontology of the historian of translation

The editorial team is interested in articles focusing on: 1) the role of the historian of translation in the research process – to represent or to interpret the data, or both; 2) the (in)visibility of the historian of translation (possibly in relation to the “invisible” figure of Venuti’s translator in The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation, 1995); 3) the way in which the historian of translation gives (or not) a direction and sense to time, in which s/he outlines a trajectory and an apparently objective discourse; 4) the deontological impact of the attitudes and decisions articulated under 1), 2), 3); 5) terms for defining the ethics of the historian of translation.

 

These are but a few analytical directions that Translationes 7 (2015) wants to bring to the attention of scholars in the field. Through the articles that will respond to this call for papers, our journal of translation studies and traductology wishes to establish an inter- and trans-cultural dialogue which could bring significant contributions to knowledge and paint as comprehensive and nuanced a picture as possible of the current concerns regarding the history of translation.

 

Calendar

 

October 1, 2015: Deadline for submitting articles in electronic format to: isttrarom.translationes@gmail.com..

October 1-29, 2015: Blind peer review of submissions by two reviewers from the scientific and editorial board or by external reviewers.

October 30, 2015: Notification of authors regarding the conditions of acceptance or rejection of submissions. Return of submissions together with evaluation reports.

November 15, 2015: Deadline for resubmitting articles finalised according to the reviewers’ comments and the journal’s style sheet.

 

 

Translated from the Romanian by Dana Crăciun