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Article ID: CBB702800425

Historians of Science Translating the History of Science: Blur versus Grit (2018)

Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 109
Issue: 4
Pages: 789-795

URI: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/701296

DOI: 10.1086/701296

Publication Date: 2018
Edition Details: Focus: Historians of Science Translating the History of Science
Language: English

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Every discipline of inquiry takes certain tasks for granted. They are not seen as the big questions that inspire and guide the field, even though they have been the practices that shape and imprint its deepest presuppositions. The question of translation, having been the focus of other humanist disciplines for decades, has come to the history of science only as of late. This essay, as a final review of the issues raised in a Focus section entitled “Historians of Science Translating the History of Science,” discusses the underlying struggle between elegant renditions and literal accuracy and opens up larger and comparative questions about the reflexive capacity of a discipline, its conditions for knowledge, and the historical mishaps and shared labor that can connect or thwart the process beyond local origins. The essay offers comparative cases in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China as a counterpoint, where the Western history of science became world knowledge through unintended readership.

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Article H. Floris Cohen (2018) Introduction. Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 744-746). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB702800425/

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