The three translations of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation invested the text with new meaning. None of the translations endorsed the book for the author's advocacy of species transformation. The first translation, into German , put forward the text as evincing divine design in nature. The second, into Dutch , also presented Vestiges as proof of divine order in nature and, more specifically, as aiding the stabilization of society under God and king in a process of recovery from (...) the 1848 Revolution. By contrast, the third translation, into German , interpreted the book as furthering the very revolutionary, anti-ecclesiastical and anti- monarchist ideals that the Dutch edition sought to counter. (shrink)

Despite the increasing interest in translation in the last two decades, there has been no investigation of the translation of historiography and its transformation from one language to another. This article takes as a case study the translation into French of Ibn Khaldûn, the fourteenth-century North African historian. It considers specifically the translation done by William de Slane in the context of the colonization of Algeria. The Histoire des Berbères, the French narrative of Ibn Khaldûn that relates to the history (...) of Arabs and Berbers in the Maghreb, has become since then the source of French knowledge of North Africa. It is upon that French narrative that colonial and post-colonial historians have constructed their knowledge of North Africa, of Arabs, and of Berbers. The article shows how a portion of the writing of Ibn Khaldûn was translated and transformed in the process in such a way as to become a French narrative with colonial categories specific to the nineteenth century. Using a semiotic approach and analyzing both the French text and its original, the article shows how colonialism introduced what Castoriadis calls an "imaginary" by transforming local knowledge and converting it into colonial knowledge. In showing this the essay reveals that not only is translation not the transmission of a message from one language to another, it is indeed the production of a new text. For translation is itself the product of an imaginary, a creation--in Ricoeur's words, a "restructuring of semantic fields.". (shrink)