The history of Translation Studies as a discipline

Abstract

This chapter deals with the historical features, constraints, choices, and effects of the enterprise that consists of writing a history of modern translation studies. It first discusses the mainstream distinction between, on the one hand, the age-old history of ideas on translation commonly presented as the pre-discipline of scholarly thought and, on the other, the 20th twentieth-century self-proclaimed birth of the discipline called ‘“translation studies”’. Secondly, it gives a brief overview of a number of recent attempts to produce histories of modern translation studies. Thirdly, it lists some of the challenges that face the design of histories to come. Fourthly, it reflects on some of the tools at the disposal of the translation historian. Finally, it suggests an approach that extends beyond the short-term frame of contemporary translation studies and tries, instead, to embed it in a broader history of translation knowledge.