Abstract Summary
Institutions are inherently communicative contraptions. Their language of operation encodes activities and endows governing bodies with a tongue that is instrumental for exercising power. Institutions tend to stabilize their verbal means in order to set up patterns of normativity for various practices, which ensures the commensurability of discourses and procedures. However, what if a Babylonian confusion befalls institutions? How do they ensure meaningful operation when having to mediate between two or more languages, which also involves shifts in the hierarchies of values, skills, means of verbal, visual, and numerical representation, and various branches of terminologies? The institutional politics of neologisms intervenes with matters of cultural identity and participates in scientific, technological, and pedagogical discussions. This panel will explore the translation of pre-modern knowledge about nature across lingual and cultural domains, and will focus on what is "gained in translation" in terms of negotiating and advancing different kinds of normativity, while pre-modern institutions were employing various verbal, numerical, visual, and material formats to cope with translations. By looking into the translation-related normativity within organizational frameworks we seek to clarify how the routines of translation helped fine-tune the functionality of knowledge in transfer. We will zoom in on themes in translation on a global scale and at several types of the early modern institutions of science, technology, and power in order to discuss the systematic issues of translation that manifested themselves at the early stages of global institutional developments.
Self-Designated Keywords :
translation, knowledge transfer, practical knowledge, institutional frameworks, verbal, numerical, visual, normativity
