Focus and Scope
Doing Translation History is booming. In recent years, various academic fields, such as Translation Studies, Literary Studies, History of Knowledge Research, or Transfer Studies, have, to an ever-increasing extent, taken on translation phenomena from an historical angle. This has, in fact, led to a vast and growing archive of individual and heterogeneous ‘cases’. The sheer amount of rapidly accumulated data could also cause researchers to lose sight of the ‘big picture’.
Translation history has a lot to offer: a wide range of un-researched, “raw” material and the promise of providing new insights into transfer processes, history of science, literature and language, history itself and many more disciplines because it brings new perspectives, transcultural approaches to the table. But the study of translation histories lacks systematic approaches, critically reviewed methods and common (TS-based) perspectives.
The journal’s name Chronotopos represents its program in various ways: the historicity of translatorial events shall be discussed – meaning their relationship with time and space. Furthermore, this discussion needs to be related to historiography, that is the narrative of translatorial events.
Chronotopos is a platform to exchange and share data (“maps and timelines”) and presents case studies of translation events, as well as discusses and reflects how to write translation history.
The main topics of Chronotopos therefore are:
1) Settings: Spaces in time, Schauplätze, are a relevant category for translatorial events to prevent ahistorical generalizations.
2) Agents: (in first instance translators) and the way they act or move in space have already become of central interest in Translation Studies (see for instance www.uelex.de).
3) Narration: From a narrative point of view, it is important to choose the relevant units of space and time (Raum- und Zeiteinheiten). A transcultural or transnational perspective could bring new insights due to the fact that translation events usually deal with more than one of the traditional national or cultural spaces and also because it is a relatively new perspective that has not received attention so far. Transcultural categories could therefore provide a structuring frame for the Cultural history of translation that is to be written.
4) Time: What role does time carry out within this structure? Are time-based categories and concepts (periodization, temporalities) conceivable and useful for structuring Translation History?
Chronotopos invites TS researchers as well as researchers of other disciplines to discuss the above presented range of topics in Translation History. The journal will be published in an online only, open-access format to put into practice the idea of scientific research as a social action that is free, accessible and transparent. Chronotopos publications will go through a double-blind review process. Nevertheless, we encourage a direct and personal exchange between the author and the reviewer on a voluntary basis to encourage a fruitful discussion and thus to improve the review process. The review process will be published together with the article.
