ABSTRACT

This chapter describes a course that explores the centrality of translation to knowledge production across the humanities and social sciences. It is designed for graduate students and advanced undergraduates who have declared concentrations in those disciplines. Assigned readings are drawn from anthropology, history, linguistics, literary theory, philosophy, legal and political theory, and sociology, along with translation studies. Starting with the translation history of "human sciences" serves to introduce the methodology of the course, which is organized around the genealogy of key concepts as they migrate across languages and disciplines. The chapter reviews briefly the distinction between verstehen, the interpretive understanding characteristic of the human sciences, and erklaren, often associated with explanation in the natural sciences. This distinction anticipates our discussion of translation as a hermeneutic practice, in which the meaning of a text is not fixed but rather emerges as it is subject to an interpretive process in this case, as it is translated.