On Researching Early Modern Mediated Translations: Challenges and Prospects

IN OUR FIRST FORAYS into the complex landscape of early modern (English) mediated translation, we have come to identify a number of challenges and obstacles to research in this area, from the difficulty of accessing textual or biographical information, to deeper epistemological and critical biases that seem significantly harder to remedy. What follows is a joint reflection on the main issues that we are currently facing and working to address, and the prospects that research on early modern translations involving multiple textual, linguistic and material mediations may open up for scholars of the Renaissance and beyond.

The first, obvious challenge concerns the task of identifying mediated translations. As noted by our colleagues in the Lisbon IndirecTrans research group, this is a general issue but it presents particular problems for the early modern period.1 While catalogues of early modern literary production in various languages certainly exist, and offer crucial information pertaining to the study of early modern texts, mediated or not, translations still often remain relatively invisible as such.2 This is unfortunately the case even with the most recent edition of the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC), an otherwise impressive free-access online database combining resources from a vast array of libraries in Europe to offer a bibliographical survey of early modern print culture between 1450 and 1650.3 While translations are technically tagged as such in the USTC, they still remain difficult to identify – perhaps due to the heterogeneous nature of the data and metadata compiled into the catalogue. A simple search using ‘translat*’ as a keyword returns 2176 English titles, while so far the verified number of texts translated into English for the period amounts to more than 6000, according to the Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Online Catalogue of Translations in Britain 1473–1640.4 The difficulties inherent in compiling a cohesive corpus of translations, mediated or otherwise, for a given geographical area, or particular time period, was precisely what inspired the creation of the above-mentioned Renaissance Cultural Crossroads catalogue and its follow-up, Cultural Crosscurrents in Stuart and Commonwealth Britain. An Online Analytical Catalogue of Translations 1641–1660. Both specifically document cases of identified indirect translations and provide as much information as possible as to the mediating texts, languages and translators.