Translating Science in the 18th and 19th Centuries

This book explores translation’s role in shaping the knowledge-sharing processes that were and are seminal to scientific endeavour. It considers the mechanisms by which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European science writing travelled within and beyond its home continent and non-European science was taken up in a colonial context. Using insights from fields of research including book history and textual studies to investigate the paratextual framing, stylistic choices, rhetorical devices and modes of expression deployed by scientific writers—key to shaping a work’s credibility and its author’s integrity—it argues that translators are central, yet largely overlooked, mediators in this creative process.

Encompassing West Africa, China, the Middle East, India, South America, Europe and the Ottoman Empire, this volume comprises case studies working with around a dozen different languages to gain a sense of how scientific narratives were evolving both within and across an increasingly global intellectual commons in a key period in the development of the natural sciences, medicine, and technology.

Part of the Science and Technology Studies series, the volume will be indispensable for scholars and researchers of science and technology studies, philosophy of science, translation studies, gender studies, English literature, and philosophy in general.