From Scholarly to Commercial Writing: German Women Translators in the Age of the ‘Translation Factories’

Afterword: Translation and the Histories and Geographies of the Book

“…A translation undertaken in a medieval monastery, as opposed to the scholastic setting of a university, not only has a different audience in mind for the translation, but also undertakes writing for a different purpose: not primarily to disseminate, and thus make knowledge available for other scholars, but to preserve it from the ravages of time. 27 Translation in the context of the nineteenth-century market place, as we know only too well from translation practices in Grub Street 28 or the translation factories in German lands, 29 was often teamwork and undertaken in a hurry to meet an ever-increasing demand for works of fiction. While setting, locale, geographical positioning -the where -can give us clues as to the material conditions of translation, who translated, what was predominantly translated, and how much was translated, it can additionally tell us something about the different practices and experiences of translation.…”