Searching for Statesmanship: a Corpus-Based Analysis of a Translated Political Discourse

Abstract

With its connotations of superior moral integrity, exceptional leadership qualities and expertise in the science of government, the modern ideal of statesmanship is most commonly traced back to the ancient Greek concept of πολιτικός (politikos) and the work of Plato and Aristotle in particular. Through an analysis of a large corpus of modern English translations of political works, built as part of the AHRC Genealogies of Knowledge project (http://genealogiesofknowledge.net/), this case-study aims to explore patterns that are specific to this translated discourse, with a view to understanding the crucial role played by translators in shaping its development and reception in society. It ultimately seeks to argue that the model of statesmanship presented in translations from ancient Greek is just as much a product of the receiving culture (and the social anxieties of Victorian Britain especially) as it is inherited from the classical world.

Methods and visualization tools for the analysis of medical, political and scientific concepts in Genealogies of Knowledge

“…This observation session took place after a piece of analytical work had already been completed, but Henry offered to explain and re-enact a portion of the investigation for the purposes of this study. The analysis we observed contributed to a publication (Jones, 2019). The following is a summary of the observed analysis and explanation.…”

Rehumanizing the migrant: the translated past as a resource for refashioning the contemporary discourse of the (radical) left

“…In the case of the Greek-English Corpus, whatever patterns the analysis highlights reflect a mix of translator interpretation of the main text and their framing of it in introductions and prefaces. In some types of study (like Jones, 2019, specifying what patterns arise from paratexts such as introductions and what arise from the translated version of the main text may be important, though as shown by Jones the patterns identified tend to hold across both textual spheres. Given that this section does not set out to examine the extent to which any given translation or commentary captures the original meaning of Greek lexical items-a quest that would be further complicated by the remoteness of the ancient world being interpreted, even from the perspective of specialists-there is no need to distinguish between paratext and main text.…”

Hippocrates transformed: crafting a Hippocratic discourse of medical semiotics in English, 1850–1930

“…Received: 11 December 2019; Accepted: 10 June 2020; Notes 1 Along similar lines, the Genealogies of Knowledge English print subcorpus has been used to understand the reception of Greek political ideas in modern English translations of ancient Greek authors as in part a product of the social, political, and cultural conditions of Britain in the 19th century (Jones, 2019a(Jones, , 2019b). 2 Foucault (1984a) provides clearest exposition of the principle assumptions, import, and ramifications of genealogy as an approach to the study of truth, moral value, and the human subject.…”

“…In this paper, I shall analyse data relating to the former in order to document how Hippocrates translators activate particular 19th-century medical categories and vocabularies to construct a Hippocratic semiotic theory by translating key texts in the Hippocratic corpus. 1 The study is, therefore, genealogical, in line with the loose sense the Genealogies of Knowledge project assigns the term in their publications (Jones, 2019a(Jones, , 2019bKarimullah, 2020a;Baker, 2020). In the social sciences and humanities genealogy is typically associated with Michel Foucault.…”

“…Rather than denoting a specific methodology, saying that these studies are genealogical is simply to say that they share a set of assumptions about history, truth, the human subject, the event, knowledge, and discourse. Unlike Foucault, however, our research is aimed at revealing how translation plays a significant but understudied role in the evolution of political concepts in time and across cultures (Baker, 2020;Karimullah, 2020aKarimullah, , 2020bJones, 2019aJones, , 2019b. This study is genealogical in the sense that it traces the emergence of a Hippocratic medical discourse in English in the 19th century, while recognising that the emergence of the relations between body, knowledge, and illness this ancient discourse propounds are given a modern inflection by translation.…”