Translation in the Social Sciences and Humanities: Circulating and Canonizing Knowledge

Abstract

This article explores elements of knowledge-making in translatorial practices in the social sciences and humanities. It approaches the relationship between translation and knowledge-making within the rules of the game of the academic field, with particular attention to mechanisms of symbolic recognition. Translations and translating are understood as forms of knowledge-making which take place both overtly and covertly. This article draws on quantitative material relating to the paratexts of translations from German into French and a corpus of paratexts surrounding translations of Weber’s Protestant Ethic into English in order to describe aspects of the relationship between translation and knowledge-making.