When Dragons Show Themselves: Research, Constructing Knowledge, and the Practice of Translation

This essay explores several research and writing aspects of translating scholarship, particularly those often disparaged as “explicitation.” It employs examples drawn from contemporary translation practice to argue that, in the context of scholarly translation, explicitation becomes an enabling and clarifying activity that shows how words and expressions mean through the specific contexts in which they appear. The essay approaches translation as a distinctive form of writing, defining it as a practice in the Aristotelian sense, arguing that “it is possible to think like a translator,” and proposing how such thinking differs from that of practitioners in other fields.