ABSTRACT

This article builds on Annie Brisset’s chapter ‘Clémence Royer, ou Darwin en colère’ (2002:173–203), in which she argues that Clémence Royer’s French translation (1861) of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) was adapted to the French positivistic style, that Royer’s own voice was injected into the translation and that the French translation conveyed a higher degree of certainty than the English original. The comparative study presented here investigates whether two Dutch translations (Winkler 1860 and Hellemans 2000) show similar shifts in certainty or epistemic stance (Kärkkäinen 2003). Quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted of Darwin’s chapter four on ‘Natural Selection’ and its two translations, focusing on a set of modal words and using an adapted version of Martin and White’s epistemic scale of ranking (2005). Comparisons between Darwin’s text and its translations reveal a positivistic voice, similar to Royer’s, in Winkler’s nineteenth-century translation but not in the contemporary translation by Hellemans. The findings are discussed in terms of target audiences, language-inherent characteristics and general translation tendencies.