Translation archives : an introduction [Recurso electrónico]

For archival scientists, the archive is both a source of research objects and an object of research. The current issue of Meta adopts this perspective to explore archives as repositories of the evidence of translation and as sites that shape our understanding of the translation process, the translation profession, and the lives of translators. Over the past decades, translation research has grown in complexity and relevance through a series of encounters with other disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive sciences, history, and intercultural studies (Gambier 2006: 31). The archive enriches this dialogue, firstly, by offering an invaluable trove of primary sources for such inquiry, and secondly, by presenting a new vector through which to measure, critique, and conceptualize translation practice, its function and status in societies past and present. Researchers comb the archive for materials most relevant to their own investigation, yet a single source lends itself to a variety of readings: a translation draft of a poem, for example, will stimulate a literary scholar to decode its variations and intertextual references, a sociologist will use it when sketching out the translator’s habitus and professional milieu, the cognitive scientist may detect the operation of memory and environment, a linguist its stylistic patterns or socio-linguistic phenomena, and so on.