Chapter 2. The circulation of knowledge vs the mobility of translation, or how mobile are translators and translations?

Abstract

One way of doing research on translation history is to measure and analyse translations (for a classic example see Pym and Chrupała 2005). This quantitative approach normally focuses on published translations between different languages and as such is limited in several respects. First, it focuses primarily on translations as products of translatorial activities. Secondly, translation flows are mostly structured along particular source and target languages, which are more than often not equated with particular political entities. In my contribution I would like to adopt a spatial approach to these translation flows. In doing so, I focus not only on translations as physical objects but also on the agents enabling them, that is authors, translators and finally readers. My aim is to reconstruct patterns of mobility of relevant agents and objects in translation which together constitute a so-called translatorial space. Where do these agents live and work? Where are these works published and where are the readers of these works located? Is the mobility of ideas automatically connected to the mobility of people or objects? In this respect it is not important that a certain language or literature circulates, but how it disseminates beyond its initial place(s) of origin.