TRANSLATING KNOWLEDGE, TRANSLATING CULTURES [603623]

1 Peter Burke
TRANSLATING KNOWLEDGE, TRANSLATING CULTURES

One of the many shifts or turns in historical thought and historical writing in the
last generation has been the turn from intellectual history to c ultural history, from the
history of ideas to the history of meanings. Like most such shifts or turns, this one is not
complete. Some intellectual historians continue as they did before, whi le others produce
what we might call ‘hybrid’ studies. That is, they approach topics that used to be vi ewed
as part of intellectual history – the history of ideas, the histor y of knowledge – from a
broader, cultural or socio-cultural point of view. This broader approach is the central
theme of this paper.

I
It is a commonplace to note that the topics that historians choose to study are
related to the problems, anxieties, hopes and debates occurring at the time that they are
writing. In today’s ‘information society’, historians are turning to the study of
information – how and why it is collected, how it is organized, class ified, criticized and
employed for a variety of purposes, in short, turned from information tha t is more or
less ‘raw’ into knowledge that has been processed or ‘cooked’.1
In an age of globalization, in which the internationalization of knowle dge is
visible on the screens of our computers and televisions, historians are coming to view
past knowledge as the result of an international or even an interc ontinental process of
cultural exchange or cultural transfer. To offer a recent example from the area and the
period on which I usually work, between 1997 and 2002, the European Science
Foundation sponsored a programme devised by the French historian Robert
Muchembled and entitled ‘Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe’. One of the four
international teams, the one of which I was a member, was concerned with information
and communication. 2
As is usually the case with a new turn or a new trend, problem s arise in the
course of research, leading us to question the very concepts with whic h we started. It
might for example be better to use the term ‘knowledge’ in the pl ural than in the
singular, to speak of different knowledges or systems of knowledge in different parts of
the world or among different social groups – professors and artisans, me n and women,
young and old, etc.
Again, the idea of a ‘transfer’ of knowledge is less helpful than t he idea of the
transfer of technology on which the concept was modelled. For one thing , when there is
an encounter between two cultures, information usually flows in both direc tions, even if
in unequal amounts. We might therefore speak of intellectual or cultural ‘exchange s’.
But even the term ‘exchange’ is unsatisfactory in some ways. Lik e the old term
‘tradition’, it implies handing over something that remains more or less unchanged.
However, it has become increasingly apparent in the last generat ion, in studies ranging
from sociology to literature, that ‘reception’ is not passive but ac tive. Ideas,
information, artefacts and practices are not simply adopted but on th e contrary, they are
adapted to their new cultural environment. They are first decontextua lized and then
recontextualized, domesticated or ‘localized’. In a word, they are ‘translat ed’.

2 II
The phrase ‘cultural translation’ can be heard on many lips today, including
those of anthropologists, linguists, literary critics and students of religion as well as
cultural historians. The metaphor now seems an obvious one, and it goes back at least
eighty years. In the 1920s, the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, for example,
claimed that ‘the learning of a foreign culture is like the l earning of a foreign tongue’
and that he was attempting ‘to translate Melanesian conditions int o our own’. A few
years later, in the Thirties, the Hungarian sociologist Karl M annheim, complaining
about the difficulty of explaining the sociology of knowledge to the Briti sh, remarked
on ‘the urgent need and the great difficulty of translating one cul ture in terms of
another’. 3 He should know. Mannheim was himself translated to England (in the se nse
of transferred, as a refugee). Indeed he was part of what we mi ght call the great
Translatio Studii in which Central European scholars, mainly German-speaking and
Jewish, took refuge the Hitler regime, mainly in Britain and the USA.
In a broader, looser sense, the idea of cultural translation is sti ll older, taking us
back to the Renaissance. Florio, in his preface to the reader jus tified his translation of
Montaigne, in a kind of captatio benevolentiae , by saying that we all translate, even the
writers of ‘original’ works. If there is nothing new under the sun, ‘What do the best,
then, but glean after others' harvest? Borrow their colours, inherit their possessions?
What do they but translate?'
However, the more precise idea that understanding an alien culture wa s
analogous to the work of translation first became current among a nthropologists in the
1950s and 1960s in the circle of Edward Evans-Pritchard. As one of them has claimed,
‘Anthropology is an art of translation’. 4 We might say the same thing about history,
since ‘the past is a foreign country’ where they do things differ ently and perhaps think
differently as well.
As translators know, the passage of a text from one language t o another is not a
smooth or easy one. It requires negotiation. 5 Many words in one language lack exact
equivalents in another. Keywords or Grundbegriffe are part of a given culture and resist
translation. Translators learn to live with a dilemma: should they be faithful to the
original text from which they are translating, or intelligible to the readers of the text
they are writing?
There are two opposite solutions to the problem, two strategies to fol low, the
maximalist and the minimalist. The maximalist strategy is better known as
domestication, while the minimalist has become known as ‘foreignizi ng’. In the famous
words of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the choice lies between taking the text to the reader,
in other words adapting it to the culture in which it is a ‘gues t’, or taking the reader to
the text, that is, producing a version that allows or encourages the new readers to
become aware of the text’s alien or foreign qualities. 6 One strategy follows the model of
cultural translation, the other rejects or resists it.
To take a couple of examples from the field of Catholic missions, e specially the
practice of the Jesuits. Christian missionaries, like translator s, faced a dilemma when
adapting (or as was said at the time, ‘accommodating’) the Chri stian message to the
culture in which they were working. In China, Matteo Ricci chose th e maximalist
solution. He translated the word ‘God’ by the neologism Tianzhu , literally ‘Lord of
Heaven’, and allowed Chinese Christians to refer simply to Tian, ‘Heaven’, as
Confucius had done. Ricci also discovered that if he dressed as a pri est no one would
take him seriously, so he dressed like a Confucian scholar instead, thus ‘translating’ his
social position into Chinese. He allowed the Chinese whom he converted to pay

3 reverence to their ancestors in the traditional manner, arguing tha t this was a social
custom rather than a religious one.
In Rome, the Jesuits were accused of having been converted to the rel igion of
the Chinese rather than converting them to Christianity. What appeared in Beijing to be
a good cultural translation looked more like a mistranslation in Rome . Other Jesuit
missionaries chose the other horn of the dilemma from Ricci, the mi nimalist one,
keeping their traditional black robes and also the Latin word Deus , glossing rather than
translating it into different languages, from Huron to Tagalog.

III
It is time to move closer to the case-study with which this le cture will end. It is a
case-study in the translation of knowledge in early modern Europe, us ing the term
‘translation’ in both the literal and the metaphorical sense. To l ink the two kinds of
translation is indeed my main purpose, stressing the point that int erlingual translation is
one of the most visible or audible parts of cultural translation. In ot her words, we need a
historical anthropology of interlingual translation. 7
Translation between languages is obviously of central importance in an y history
of cultural exchange, including exchanges of information about histor y, geography,
politics, natural philosophy, architecture and so on. A historical anthropol ogy of
translation might focus on two questions: What was translated? How was it transl ated?
What was translated, and where, reveals what one culture finds of interest in
another, separated from it either in space or time. Take the case of historical writing.
Ancient historians were translated more than any modern authors. In di fferent European
vernaculars, nearly 300 translations of 25 ancient historians were publi shed between the
invention of printing and the end of the eighteenth century. To this fi gure we have to
add the translations of Greek historians into Latin. 8 The leading historians translated
were Sallust, Valerius Maximus and Caesar, in that order, a choic e that says something
about the difference between the early modern and later periods.
Among ‘modern’ historians, from Leonardo Bruni onwards, I have so far
discovered 553 published translations of 340 texts by 263 historians, and there may well
be many more. Italian, French and Latin were the languages from which most historians
were translated. English, Latin, French, Dutch and German led the languages into which
texts were translated. The importance of translations from the vernacular into Latin is
worth noting, as a major means for the dissemination of information a cross Europe. 9
The historians most translated were Commynes (eleven translations in the period), then
the Jesuit missionary Martino Martini’s account of the fall of the Ming dynasty in China
(nine translations). Four texts tie for third place because theyw ere translated eight times
each: Francesco Guicciardini’s History of Italy , the Italian bishop Paolo Giovio’s
History of His Own Time , Sleidan’s Commentaries – which might be described as a
political history of the Reformation – and Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent .
How were these texts translated? In other words, what was the dominant
‘regime’ or ‘culture’ of translation in the early modern period? Despite frequent
references to the ‘laws’ of translation, the early modern culture of translation was one of
relative freedom. Translators generally followed what Venuti cal ls the ‘fluent strategy’,
the one that ‘domesticates the foreign text’, offering the rea der ‘the narcissistic
experience of recognizing his or her culture in a cultural other ’. 10 If they still used that
once fashionable term, anthropologists might describe what these trans lators were doing
as a form of ‘acculturation’.

4 Translations were often made indirectly, at second hand, as title-pa ges
(‘shamelessly’, as we might say) admit. French was a common medium: Italian or
Spanish texts were translated into English via French, while Eng lish texts followed the
same route into German. Modern texts were not infrequently consider ed capable of
improvement by their translators (Rawlinson’s version of Lenglet du Fresnoy’s method
for studying history, published in 1728, was described on the title-page a s ‘translated
and improved’). What were described at the time as ‘translations’ often differed from
the originals in major respects, whether they abridged the tex ts or amplified them.
Major changes of this kind were often made without warning the reader.
The borderline between translation and imitation was drawn less shar ply than it
would be in the nineteenth century. In some cases the context was shif ted from one
locale to another, a process that may be described in musical terms as ‘transposition’ or
– following the practice of current translators of software – as ‘localization’. The
translation of Machiavelli’s Arte della Guerra into Spanish displaced the dialogue from
Italy to Spain and turned the speakers into two Spaniards, the Great Captain Gonzalo
Fernández de Cordoba and the Duke of Najara, perhaps because Spanish readers of the
period would not have expected to learn anything about war from Italians.
Even more shocking for modern readers, translators of works of histor y or
natural philosophy sometimes allowed themselves to express opinions t hat the original
author would have repudiated. With characteristic boldness, when Cardinal de Retz,
who had been a rebel himself, translated Agostino Mascardi’s history of the conspiracy
by Count Fieschi, he contradicted his source text by turning the prot agonist from a
villain into a hero.
However, no dominant regime lacks opposition, whether in translation or in
politics. Attempts at foreignization can be found long before the nine teenth century,
most obviously in the case of the Bible: some translations of the Ol d Testament into
English and Dutch took pains to imitate Hebrew formulae and syntax. N icolas
D’Ablancourt is notorious for the freedom of his French translations f rom the classics,
but even he retained some technical terms such as ‘cohort’ or ‘cent urion’ when
translating ancient writers, since their armies were very di fferent from ‘ours’. The
reason for this temporary shift into foreignization, which led D’Abl ancourt to provide
his translation of Appian with a glossary, was probably that he was writing for
noblemen who took considerable interest in the details of military organization.

IV
What follows is concerned with the cultural translation of the Turks by western
travellers writing in their own language and also with the t ranslations of those
translations into other languages, especially Latin, Italian, Fre nch, English, German and
Dutch. In Spanish, relatively little on the Turks appeared in print a t this time, whether
original works or translations. 11 However, a number of translations remained in
manuscript, together with one fascinating sixteenth-century text, t he Viaje de Turquía .
Scholars are still discussing who wrote the Viaje and whether it represents first-hand
observation or should be treated as a work of fiction based on secondary sources. 12
The problem for all the writers discussed here was that of d eciding which
technical terms to translate (and how) and which were better l eft in the original Turkish.
When their books were translated into other languages, translators had to make the s ame
decision, crucial for the transmission of both information and ideas.

5 In early modern Europe, let us say from 1453 to 1789, the Ottoman Empi re and
Turkish culture were translated in two very different ways. On one side we see the
persistence of traditional stereotypes. On the other, we find examples of a f resher vision,
generally the result of direct observation at close quarters. Some individuals combine or
at any rate juxtapose schematic and fresh perceptions.
The stereotyped ways in which western Europeans viewed the Ottom an Empire
in the early modern period are well known. The medieval stereotype of Muslims as ‘the
scourge of God’, ‘the enemy of the Cross’, ‘perfidious infidel’, ‘the new barbarian’ ‘was
carried over to the Ottomans’. 13 These ideas form part of the discourse of ‘orientalism’
described by Edward Said 30 years ago, though with more emphasis on c ruelty and less
on passivity – unsurprisingly enough, since the Turks conquered and colonized Ea stern
Europe, not the other way round. 14
What was new at this time was the emphasis on the Ottoman polit ical regime.
Five keywords in different languages recur to describe this regi me: tyranny, despotism,
absolutism, slavery and lordship (the sultan as il grande signore , owning all the land in
the Ottoman Empire).
Another kind of stereotyping was associated with Renaissance humanis m. Take
the case of Pietro Bembo, author of a Latin history of Venice whic h naturally had much
to say about the neighbours of the Venetians. Bembo was a purist who believed that
Latin prose should imitate Cicero. Hence Bembo calls the Turkish ga lleys biremes , the
spahis equites , the admiral of the Turkish fleet prefectus classis Thraciae and the sultan
Regem Thracium .15 The janissaries were often described as the ‘praetorian guards’ ,
praetoriani milites .

V
A different style of translating the Turks was based on relative ly close
encounters and on more or less first-hand information from former pris oners,
ambassadors or consuls who had lived in the Ottoman Empire. These wr iters generally
‘foreignized’ the Turks by keeping technical terms in their ori ginal language – as
anthropologists do in their ethnographies – explaining rather than transla ting them, even
when writing Latin and referring to dragomani, bassae, janizari and so on.
In an oral presentation, I don’t want to overwhelm you with Turkish words that I
probably won’t pronounce correctly, although the force of the argument is proportional
to the number of such indigenous terms, especially the names for di fferent kinds of
official, that are to be found in western texts.
In the case of the vernaculars, domestication was even less common t han in the
case of Latin, although a few translators were supporters of li nguistic purism. Take the
case of the Italian bishop Paolo Giovio, for instance, whose Italia n account of the Turks
had at least eight Italian editions in the sixteenth century as w ell translations into Latin,
German, English and Spanish. Giovio left terms such as aga , beylerbey or timariot in
Turkish. The prevalence of foreignizing might be linked to the increas ing interest in
foreign manners and customs shown by Europeans from the sixteenth century onwards.
In the seventeenth century, foreignizing becomes still more obvious. Take the
case of Paul Rycaut, an Englishman of Flemish descent who lived in Istanbul and
Smyrna (Izmir) from 1661 to 1678, as consul or secretary to the ambass ador
(incidentally, Rycaut was a translator himself, from the Spani sh). Rycaut saw the

6 Ottoman Empire from the point of view of a merchant and diplomat inte rested in peace
and trade. 16
In his The history of the present state of the Ottoman Empire ( 1667), several
times reprinted as well as being translated into French, Dutch, Ge rman, Polish, Italian
and Russian, Rycaut called the Turks ‘men of the same composition wi th us’, so that
they ‘cannot be so savage and rude as they are generally descri bed’. He noted the
danger of ‘contempt of the Turk’, of treating them as ‘barbarous’. Ind eed, echoing
Montaigne, he wrote of the ‘prejudice’ of treating as barbarous whate ver is ‘differenced
from us by diversity of Manners and Custom, and are not dressed in the mode and
fashion of our times and Countries’.
When he comes to speak of the political regime, he shows his concern f or
cultural specificity. ‘The Constitution of the Turkish Government being different from
most others in the World’, he wrote, ‘hath need of peculiar Maxims a nd Rules, whereon
to establish and confirm itself’.
For this reason Rycaut used many Turkish terms, explaining them in the text or
margin as he goes. Some of these terms are religious ( mufti, mullah, dervish, hoja,
imam ), some are military ( Spahees ) and a high proportion are political and
administrative (among them Bey, Defterdar, Divan, Kadi, Pasha, Pashalik ).
The translation of books from Turkish into western languages (and vice ve rsa)
was rare in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of the ra re exceptions was the
Annals [ Tac al-Tevarikh , literally ‘The Crown of Histories’] of Khojah Efendi [also
known as Sa’duddin Bin Hasan Can, 1535-99].
The English translation of Khoja Efendi was made by the clergy man William
Seaman, who had served as an embassy chaplain in Istanbul and translat ed the New
Testament into Turkish. Despite the interest in missionary activi ty revealed by his Bible
translation, Seaman did not domesticate the text. He retained the system of dating by the
year of the Hegira (adding the year of Our Lord), left technic al terms such as sanjak bey
or bassalik in the original language, filled up his margins with Turkish w ords in the
Arabic script, and went so far as to retain the term ‘unbelievers’ to refer to Chr istians.
What is more, in the preface, Seaman justified his approach in words which may
remind modern readers of Schleiermacher’s famous formulation of t he translator’s task,
taking the reader to the text rather than vice versa, or as Seam an puts it, ‘desiring rather
a little to change our propriety to fit theirs, than much to alter their phrase to put it in
ours’.
We should not imagine that we, or even our early 20 th -century predecessors,
were the first people to be interested in what is specific to pa rticular cultures and to try
to preserve that specificity in translation. Some early modern writer s were already of the
opinion that a successful strategy for understanding other cultures is precisely the
refusal to translate their keywords.

7

1 P. Burke, A Social History of Knowledge (Cambridge , 2000).
2 R. Muchembled (ed.) Cultural Exchange in Early Mod ern Europe (4 vols, Cambridge 2007).
3 Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pac ific (London, 1922), 90; Karl Mannheim, Conservatis m, ed.
David Kettler, Volker Meja and Nico Stehr (London, 1997), 118-19.
4 Malcolm Crick, Explorations in Language and Meanin g (London, 1976), 164.
5 Umberto Eco, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiat ion (London, 2003).
6 On the term ‘foreignizing’, Lawrence Venuti (ed.) Rethinking Translation
(London, 1992). On the ‘guest’ culture, Lydia H. L iu, Translingual Practice (Stanford, 1995).
7 Hans J. Vermeer, ‘Übersetzen als kultureller Trans fer’, in Mary Snell-Hornby (ed.) Übersetzungswissen schaft
(Tübingen, 1986), 30-53; Catherine Tihanyi, ‘An Ant hropology of Translation’, American Anthropologist 106
(2004), 739-42.
8 Peter Burke, ‘The Popularity of Ancient Historians 1450-1700', History and Theory 5 (1966), 135-52; id.,
‘Translating Histories’, P. Burke and R. Hsia (eds. ) Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (Camb ridge, 2007),
125-41.
9 Peter Burke, ‘Translations into Latin in Early Mod ern Europe’, in P. Burke and R. Hsia (eds.) Cultura l Translation
in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2007), 65-80.
10 Venuti (1992), 5.
11 Giovio’s book on the Turks appeared in Spanish in 1543 but it is a rare book with only one edition; S agredo’s
history was published in Spanish translation in 168 4.
12 Marie-Sol Ortola (ed.) Viaje de Turqía (Madrid, 20 00); pp.117-24 discuss the Turkish terms in the tex t. Cf. Jeremy
Lawrance, ‘Europe and the Turks in Spanish Literatu re of the Renaissance’, in Nigel Griffin et al. (ed s.) Culture and
Society in Habsburg Spain (Woodbridge 2001) 17-34.
13 Robert Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent: the Renaissance Image o f the Turk (Nieuwkoop, 1967), 147; cf.
Almut Höfert, Den Feind beschreiben (Frankfurt, 2003).
14 Carlo Dionisotti, ‘La Guerra d’Oriente nella lette ratura veneziana de Cinquecento’, rpr his Geografia e Storia della
letteratura italiana (Turin, 1967), 201-26.
15 Pietro Bembo, Historia Veneta , 1551, new edn Venice 1611, 176, 340.
16 Paul Rycaut, The history of the present state of t he Ottoman Empire (London, 1667).