ABSTRACT
The long-standing etymological link between translation and travel, not only in English but in other Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages, seems to suggest that the conceptual connection between the two activities is deeply ingrained in the human, or at least European and Anglophone, psyche. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, for instance, pays attention “not only to translation between languages but also to translation between cultures”. As imagined communities began to come into being across Europe with the rise of vernacular-language print culture, they formed literary, cultural, political and scientific polysystems for which both translation and travel writing represented valuable new sources of knowledge. In the publishing boom of the early nineteenth century, travel writing accounted for one-fifth of translations on the British book market. Women’s travel writing proved an abundant historical resource, providing ample material for an alternative historical narrative that foregrounded the role of women as authors and translators of travel literature.
