ABSTRACT
By focussing on texts that were widely disseminated across different languages, historians of print sometimes neglect the many more texts that were less successful (that is, had few or no reprints in their originating language and, for this chapter, little or no impact in translation). As Latin gradually lost its primary role as an international language of scholarship, and translation became an essential means of transnational dissemination, there were many hindrances. We have little evidence that early modern writers regarded any text as inherently ‘untranslatable’, but difficulties arose from the huge disparity in available vocabularies across different languages, the lack of high-quality dictionaries and problems of syntax, especially regarding minority languages. More complex obstacles to translation will also be examined in this chapter: cultural incompatibilities and prejudices, the reputation of an author or text, poor timing in relation to reader expectations, or even misjudged marketing techniques. In addition, we need to take account of the legal and institutional barriers created by different (often sparsely documented) forms of censorship. To illustrate the many problems in cultural translation, this chapter adopts a broad comparative approach, using a range of case studies chosen from across different linguistic communities between 1640 and 1800.
