ABSTRACT
The perceived lack and invisibility of translation and translators in national literary histories has been an important motive behind writing translation histories of nation-states or national cultures. National translation traditions have been dealt with in encyclopediasencyclopaedias and handbooks, book-length studies have been devoted to the topic, and entire projects have been designed and carried out to map translation and transfer flows between nation-states and study the impact of translation on national literatures and languages. It is, however, difficult to determine what ‘national’ means in translation history writing and what a national translation history should or could be like. Is it simply the history of translation in a nation-state? Is it a history where in which the central focus is on the role of translations in nation-building? O or a history which that subscribes to a national(istic) agenda, overtly or covertly? This chapter aims at studying projects preliminarily called here national translation histories. The focus is on their coverage, aims, and starting points, and the translation history of Finland is discussed as a case study. The word ‘national’ is used in a rather wide sense as shorthand for translation histories covering entire nation-states or other comparable (sometimes smaller or larger) areas.
