Project Details
Projekt
Translational Dimensions of French Encyclopaedism in the Age of Enlightenment (1680-1800) 2nd phase: „Transatlantic Knowledge Transfer and the Dynamics of Cultural Translation“: Textual Filiations, Cultural Transformations, (Post-)colonial Asymmetries
Subject Area
General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
Term
since 2018
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 404941385
Against the background of both the encyclopaedia’s role as one of the dominant media of the 18th century and its transnational contexts of creation, this project examines the role that translation processes played in the formation of a transnational space of knowledge and communication. In the 1st phase of the project, the importance of translations for the dissemination of the genre and for the establishment of a European knowledge space was documented on the basis of a systematic recording of all contemporary translations of encyclopaedic texts. Drawing upon case studies of 18th century Spanish encyclopaedia production and of selected French encyclopaedias, the processes of adaptation and autonomization that took place in the translation processes as well as the self-image of translators as intercultural mediators were addressed. In the 2nd phase of the project, the perspective will be broadened in spatial terms from Europe to America and re-accentuated in methodological terms. Recent translation research has focused, on the one hand, on various aspects of cultural mediation and transfer in the context of translation processes and, on the other hand, particularly under the influence of postcolonial theory, on aspects relating to decentralization/centralization, hierarchy and empowerment/disempowerment. In the second phase, the project aims to interweave these two perspectives by using encyclopaedic dictionaries with a historical-geographical focus and their knowledge of America as examples. Furthermore, it will examine the interrelationship between translation understood as a process of transfer as well as one of power. On the one hand, the intention is to investigate the shared transatlantic encyclopaedic knowledge space that was established in the context of diverse, reciprocal translation processes between Europe and America. On the other hand, the dimensions of an increasingly independent American discursive system related to knowledge about America and the reception of that knowledge in the (former) colonial ‘metropole’ are to be traced.The project pursues these topics along three axes of investigation: The first offers systematic analysis of the first American encyclopaedias and French encyclopaedic dictionaries of the 18th century that translated European, local, and Indigenous empirical knowledge about America in a specifically linguistic, generic, and cultural manner, and that commented on it critically in the paratext and in the articles. The second traces the forms of reception and appropriation of the new discourse on knowledge about America in the European ‘metropole' on the basis of a comparative analysis of the partial translations of Alcedo’s Diccionario geográfico-histórico de América and the reception of the first American encyclopaedias in the European press. The third axis proffers analysis of transatlantic social networks and cultural mediation processes relevant to the creation of the first American encyclopaedias.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
Subproject of
SPP 2130:
Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Times
