Translation Theory

• Main Author: Connor, Peter
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: Wiley 2010
• Subjects: inuit
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781444337815.wbeotnt002; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1002%2F9781444337815.wbeotnt002; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781444337815.wbeotnt002

Toward the end of his 1813 lecture “On the Different Methods of Translation,” Friedrich Schleiermacher refers to “an inner necessity” that has driven the German people to “translating en masse” (28). Schleiermacher was thinking of the abundance of translations by contemporaries such as Friedrich Hölderlin, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the brothers Wilhelm and August Schlegel, poets and scholars whose versions of Sophocles, Pindar, Aeschylus, Plato, and William Shakespeare promised to carryover into German culture “all the treasures of foreign arts and scholarship” (29). It is a noble and elevating vision of the role of translation and of the task of the translator. But another, much more authentically “mass” or “large‐scale” form of translation activity escapes Schleiermacher's notice (it is beneath his notice): driven less by “inner necessity” than by commercial interest, carried out not by renowned poets but by anonymous journeymen, the translation of the novel marks the true beginning of mass literary translation in the nineteenth century. The popular appeal of novels outside of their country of origin created an increasingly lucrative international market for publishers, who were quick to capitalize on the growing literary reputations of certain authors abroad. Within a year of its publication in 1719, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe , taken by some (e.g., Ian Watt) to be the first novel in English, was translated into French, German, and Dutch; by the end of the nineteenth century, in addition to 277 imitations (arguably a form of translation), it had been translated 110 times, including into Hebrew, Armenian, Bengali, Persian, and Inuit (Fishelov, 343). Thanks to an army of translators, Defoe's novel reached a vast, worldwide audience for which it was not originally intended. Defoe's publishers might well have mused, along with Goethe, that “national literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand” (qtd. in Damrosch, 1).