ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Translating Technologies and Images: a Context for Textual Knowledge-Making across Early Modern Cultural Spheres

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

What changes, and what remains the same, during processes of translation? And how far do cultural contexts shape what is being preserved, transformed, or ignored in such cases? This panel explores these questions by examining early modern practices of ‘cultural translation’.

This panel considers translations of European scientific and medical texts to languages and cultural contexts at both ends of Asia: the Ottoman Empire and China. How do we address examples when particular specifics – from seemingly minor details to the larger framing of a piece, its ‘disciplinary’ orientation, and even its purpose – are transformed through translation? By examining an astronomical treatise, an anatomical text, and images from materia medica, the papers in this panel suggest that it was not necessarily precision, accuracy, and adherence to the original that were the at the heart of making textual knowledge. These papers move beyond notions of cultural translations rooted primarily within and among textual works. They provide examples of cultural translation, encompassing the translation of technologies and images, to understand the kinds of shifts that took place in the early modern textual worlds.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Hansun Hsiung, Durham University

Individual Presentations

• What’s in a name? Visual Botanical Translations between Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe - Duygu Yildirim, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• A Mongolian Anatomical Translation of a Manchu Text: the Making of Early Modern Cultural Knowledge - Sare Aricanli, Durham University

• An Ottoman Sufi’s Interpretation of ‘New Astronomy’ - Xiwen Yang, University of California, Davis

Session Organizers

• Sare Aricanli, Durham University

• Duygu Yildirim, University of Tennessee, Knoxville