Peter Burke’s general aim in this lecture is to discuss translation between languages as a special, highly visible (or audible) example of what anthropologists call ‘cultural translation’, the adaptation of artefacts and practices in the course of their passage from one culture to another. The case-study he will present is that of the translation into different western languages, in the 16th and 17th centuries, of accounts of the Ottoman Empire, a process in which translators already faced the well-known modern dilemma of the choice between ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignizing’.
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