Introduction

This is the third installment of a three-part series on matters of language and translation. Previous installments, “Linguistic Hegemony and the History of Science” and “Translating Science over Time,” appeared in the September 2017 and June 2018 issues. The general idea of the present Focus section is to impress on the Isis readership how expert translations in the history of science, if made by men and women who are themselves historians of science, actually come about. What problems do those of our colleagues who from time to time make translations find themselves wrestling with? What kinds of solutions have they found for those problems? To find out, I invited a number of historians of science to report on their experiences when translating a text (a source, a monograph) from one language into another. The collection of essays opens with a piece by Anita Guerrini. Not only has she published a text she herself translated; she also reports here on the kind of day-to-day translating that every scholar whomasters more than just his or her native language engages in from time to time when preparing an article or a book. In her contribution, the languages chiefly discussed are early modern French and a (as she gradually came to realize) not always correctly used neo-Latin of humanist provenance. The next essay is by Alan Rocke. In the course of his research, he found himself struggling with a highly complex nineteenth-century German source text and came to the realization that it was important enough to be made available to a wider audience than the few German historians of chemistry who were aware of its existence. Ann Hentschel and Klaus Hentschel (she a U.S.-born professional translator, he a German historian of science) report together on what happens when—over the breakfast table, as it were—they find themselves discussing how best to translate, among numerous other texts, pieces that Einstein wrote in his native German for the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. Eileen Reeves and Albert Van Helden tell us what happened when a cultural historian and a historian of science joined forces to translate a seminal set of source texts—the “Letters on Sunspots” exchanged in Italian and Latin between Galileo Galilei and Christoph Scheiner, S.J., in 1613. Day-to-day observations, and the representation thereof in drawings of the greatest attainable accuracy, formed a major component of the 1613 controversy, so how to deal with those drawings in their new publication—and therefore with the publisher, too—thus becomes part of their story.