Afterword Fixing Translation: Fixers as Paradigm for a Commensurate Social History of Translation

Abstract:Social history of translation, as Claire Gilbert reminds us via George Steiner in her "Introduction" to this special issue, sees translation operating in every act of communication. It does not sever translation, and language to wit, from people who practice and wield it. In contrast, cultural history of translation has maintained our sights on textual translation and traditions, imbricated as it is in the European heritage of the philosophy of translation of the Romantic period (Herder, Schleiermacher, Benjamin, down to Berman, Derrida, Cassin, and Apter).1 The focus on textuality—relations between texts, between ideas, and between traditions—rather than on sociality—relations between people or relations between people and translational outcomes—has been especially the hallmark of research in the period traditionally defined for Europe as medieval, and less so for the early modern period whose scholarship has been interested in intermediary figures and biographies for several decades.2 The enormous promise of a social history of translation for the whole of the premodern period (by which I mean medieval and early modern, as traditionally defined in the study of Europe and the Mediterranean) is then to allow an integrated and holistic analysis of people and texts, of orality and writing, of ephemeral phenomena and material traces. This is indeed the challenge that this special issue meets with success because it advances significantly our epistemologies and methodologies of the history of translation when it reinscribes agency and contingency at the heart of communication.