Internal History And External History Of Translation Studies

As an important form of communicative activities, translation has a long history to trace both in the west and in China. Nevertheless, a specialized study of translation history was absent from the realm of translation studies until 19th century. As a result of cultural turn in translation studies, there is a proliferation of publications in various forms. In contrast to the boom of translation history writing, the meta-history of translation remains a largely neglected area. On that account, the present thesis first examines critically two approaches to translation history, i.e. traditional and cultural and then points out that the enquiry of translation history should strike a balance between account and explanation as well as between theory and practice. This thesis also holds that the humanity of translation studies accords translation history an indispensable status within the discipline and the internal-external distinction of Philosophy of science not only helps correct the imbalance between theory and practice ensuing from cultural approach but also makes it possible to conduct respective researches into the historical dimension of the three divisions of translation studies. In addition, this thesis indicates that Braudel's theory of short time and medium time sheds light on how to handle the relationship between account and explanation and maintains that researchers should find the medium time for translation history to overcome trivialness caused by a strong preference for historical account. Besides, this thesis holds that, with paradigms playing the role of medium time in internal history, investigators are supposed to identify the paradigms which theoretical development has gone through and then relocate historical events within the paradigmatic frame of internal history. After a critical scrutiny of New Cultural History, this thesis proposes culture as the medium time of external history and states that researchers have to involve themselves actively in external history by selecting historical events of cultural importance as the subject matter and explaining their cultural causations. Finally, this paper, based on generalizations of what has been covered, attempts to construct a two-dimensional model whereby balance between theory and practice as well as between account and explanation can be maintained.