Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Volume 36, Issue 4, 2024

Lancelot Hogben (1895–1975), a peripatetic and prolific mathematical geneticist and science populariser, occupies a special niche in the history of scientific communication and translation. Not only was he a trenchant observer of the increasing dominance of Global English in scientific publications, he also leveraged his command of the cosmopolitan scientific lexicon to offer an alternative: a constructed language he called ‘Interglossa’. His extensive attention to linguistic evolution and linguistic futures peaked during World War II, particularly as a result of his forced circumnavigation of the globe during the ‘Phoney War’ of 1940. Both political and linguistic disillusionments following the war pushed him inexorably to a grudging reconciliation with some form of English as the basis for scientific (and other) communication.

We explore the topic of self-translation in migration through the biography of Fritz A. Kuttner, a German Jewish economist who became a musicologist during the years he spent in his native country just before he managed to escape from the Nazis. His interest in musicology intensified as an immigrant in Shanghai from 1939 to 1949, where he also studied pre-modern Chinese musical culture. After his emigration and becoming a US citizen, Kuttner emerged as a pioneer in this new field. We trace Kuttner’s path as a whole, but focus especially on his Shanghai years. Among other things, these are marked by his study of the Chinese language, life in the multilingual Jewish refugee community, music as a meeting point between East and West, his growing understanding of a connection between Chinese language, music and culture as a whole, and his efforts to translate his understanding of the semiotics of ancient Chinese music into the language and theoretical perspective of Western musicology. In addition to documenting his experiences and academic self-translation, we argue in favour of a broader concept of self-translation as being relevant to an intercultural sense of self.

This paper examines traces of (self-)translation in the work of the Egyptian philosopher Hasan Hanafi (1935–2021), whose academic career reflects the increasing globality of the academic field. The paper analyses Hanafi’s academic migration to France to complete his doctorate, his self-translational efforts to adapt to the French academic tradition, and the influence of his (physical and linguistic) migration on his later philosophical texts in Arabic. Hanafi was convinced that the ‘archaic’ Arabic language alienated Muslims from their own heritage, and in his later philosophical texts he thus sought to renew the Arabic language and to re-express fundamental concepts of the classical Islamic teachings. The concepts he aimed to re-express were already translated into French in his doctoral thesis. This article addresses these terminological translations into French and back into Arabic, and discusses the conceptual transformations that occurred on the way, inspired by Hanafi’s reading of Husserl and the German Idealists.

This article explores the uses of translation in the production and dissemination of knowledge by Portuguese-speaking exiles in nineteenth-century Paris. The discussion focuses on two key figures: Caetano Lopes de Moura (Bahia, 1780 — Paris, 1860), a Brazilian physician who translated from French into Portuguese historical sources on Brazil available in France, as well as medical and geographical books; and the Viscount of Santarém (Lisbon, 1791 — Paris, 1856), who edited Portuguese-language manuscripts, rewriting them in modern Portuguese, and published works on history, geography, and cartography on Portugal and Lusophone Africa in Portuguese, and self-translated these works into French. Arguably, these translations produced by two very different intellectuals created new forms of scholarship in exile. On the one hand, they changed the landscape of Portuguese scientific language by importing alien concepts and thus creating an experience of foreignisation. On the other hand, the collaborative work involved in translating historical and geographical source texts into (modern) Portuguese led to the formation of a network of displaced intellectuals, thus creating new spaces for translation, the production of knowledge and collaboration.

Since the 1970s, the circumstances of the twentieth-century migration of exiled intellectuals and scientists from Franco-era Spain to Mexico have aroused major interest in both Spain and Mexico (Fagen 1973; Abellán 1976–1978; VV.AA. 1982; VV.AA. 1987). The resulting studies shed light on the lives and careers of exiled Spanish scientists, many of whom went unnoticed by researchers within Spain for decades because of censorship under Franco’s regime. This article focuses on one highly representative example of an exiled Spanish scholar, Pere Bosch Gimpera (1891–1974), in order to illustrate not only the importance of scientific migration and exile in this particular context, but also the role of inter- and intralingual translation for these exiled scientists.

This article examines the repatriated self-translation of a historical monograph, The Fifteenth Year of Wan-li, by the migrant Chinese-American historian Ray Huang from his English manuscript 1587, a Year of No Significance. Through an archival analysis of the process of self-translation and publication, it is shown that the monograph’s innovative content, style, and perspectives on history studies, as well as its re-contextualisation within the Chinese context and culture, contributed to the unprecedented popularity of the self-translated monograph in China. Through a comparative intertextual analysis of the English–Chinese parallel corpus of the monograph, we observe how the self-translator made a number of non-obligatory shifts and employed distinct strategies to return the monograph from the foreign-language text back to Chinese. This study provides evidence of the agency and latitude of academic self-translators in interpreting the original work and in adapting, revising, and rewriting the target text. It also reveals how migrant academics create new knowledge spaces through implicit translation in their foreign-language texts and (re)create new knowledge spaces through repatriated self-translation for their native academic community.

In the wake of the twelfth successful coup in 2014, Thailand began to crack down on academics critical of the junta’s authority. Many fled to other countries but continue to be politically active, both online and offline. This study examines the case of Pavin Chachavalpongpun, an exiled political scientist and outspoken opponent of the military coup, and his self-translated academic book condemning the illegitimate seizure of power. His original work, A Plastic Nation, and its Thai translation, ชาติพลาสติก Chat Plastic, are closely analysed in terms of intention and intertext. The self-translator has used quotation marks to emphasise key words, adapted terms to reflect local and international concepts, rewrote sections to make new points, and broke with centuries-old norms when mentioning the monarchs in Thai spoken and written discourse. Paratexts also play a crucial role in conveying the ideological stance of the publisher and self-translator towards the military government. They serve as a deliberate reflection in which forms of contention are regenerated with political aspirations to expose the exploitation of Thai nationalism by those in power and to protest the unconstitutional military takeover that sought to preserve the authoritarian legacy. Pavin’s self-translation takes on a new meaning. It could shed some light on what self-translation as academic activism ‘can do’, in addition to what self-translation is.