Forschungskolloquium zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte

Experience and Experimentation in Translation: Richard Eden’s translation of Sebastian Münster’s "Cosmographia" (1550)

Datum
16:15 - 17:45 Uhr
Ort
Online
Veranstaltet von
Friedrich Steinle (TU Berlin)
Vortragende Person(en)
Maria Avxentevskaya (MPIWG)

Translation as an intellectual product in its own right is not so much determined by its past in the source domain, as it is shaped by its own future in the target domain. The project to be presented at the Forschungskolloquium seeks to explain the cultural and epistemic factors of learning through translation in shaping the desirable future of scientific practices. These matters are explored on the example of the translational legacy of Sebastian Münster (1489–1552), whose Cosmographia (1544), after going through many editions and translations from German into Latin, English, French, Italian, and Bohemian, became the normative standard for early modern geographical and anthropological accounts. The presentation at the colloquium will zoom in on Richard Eden’s English translation of Book V De Novis Insulis of Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographiae universalis (1550), which was printed in London in 1553 in the context of the first English publications propagating geographical discoveries in the New World. The paper will focus on the main rubrics of experience in translation, examining the relationship between the translated scientific experience, its processing through memory tools, the translator’s expertise, and experimental translation techniques.

Maria Avxentevskaya is a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and her main research interests concern the pre-modern history of scientific humanism, translation, and communication. She received her doctoral degree from the Freie Universität Berlin (2015) for her dissertation entitled “How to discover things with words? John Wilkins: from inventio to invention.” The presentation at the Forschungskolloquium will be part of her new project “Translatability in Explorations: Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (1544) in Translation between Languages, Media, and Practices” which has been selected for support by SPP 2130 “Übersetzungskulturen der Frühen Neuzeit” of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

 

Wegen der weiterhin bestehenden Einschränkungen wird das Kolloquium im Online-Format stattfinden. Für Details und aktuelle Informationen siehe https://isis.tu-berlin.de/course/view.php?id=20896.