History in Translation

This essay is part of “What Is Scholarship Today?”

Éliane Brault’s À l’ombre de la croix gammée (In the Shadow of the Swastika) is a striking account of 1940, when Germany defeated France and French defeatists created the Vichy regime. A journalist, Résistante, and Jew, Brault escaped prison and her occupied homeland to join the Free French Forces in London. From there, she coordinated the health and welfare of wartime refugees for when the First French Army moved into Italy, France, and Germany. Brault’s book was published in 1943 by the Fighting French Forces on flimsy newsprint, and what few copies have survived are crumbling on the shelves.

I was moved by this engaging work and began working on a full translation into English to share this well-informed narrative of France’s tragic defeat and occupation, along with annotations and a substantial introduction. The entire process produced considerably more than theorist Walter Benjamin’s “echo” of the original; it also revealed to me the interplay of language and history.

I use the word “interplay” here deliberately. The relationship between language and history is critical to a competent rendering of text from one language to another. As André Lefevere states in Translating Literature, “Translators do not just translate words; they also translate a universe of discourse, a poetics, and an ideology,” much of which is germane to understanding the past.

Historians, especially intellectual historians, specialize in analyzing discursive practices over time. “Poetics” may seem an odd term in history, but it entails much besides poetry; it studies language use in all genres of writing. Colleagues will have less difficulty understanding ideologies beyond the much better known ones in politics. Translation thus subsumes critical elements of the historical discipline’s distinct manner of knowing, as Nile Green pointed out recently in “Translating: In Search of the Global Public” (AHR, June 2024).

Historians tend to regard translation as merely a technical skill. Articles in historical publications that address translation practices are rare. Most other remarks are cursory and concern editorial corrections, not substantive issues of fidelity to the original text or its interpretation. Yet translating primary sources requires more than language comprehension. To render Brault’s book for a non-Francophone audience, I have used my knowledge of the historiography of France’s defeat and occupation. Also important is understanding the coordination of conflicting German military, administrative, and Nazi Party imperatives to contend with the French Resistance and to extort resources for Germany’s pending invasion of Soviet Russia. Otherwise, the history gets lost in translation no matter how clear the words.

In short, the translation process resorts to historical practices in linguistic decisions related to people, places, and events in the text. Brault had too little time revise, and so that task is left to me, an American and nonnative speaker of French. I must address more than the misspellings, errors of detail, illogic, and ambiguous passages that, with more time, the author and her editor would certainly have corrected. To verify the accuracy of both substance and style, I lean on other primary sources, the stock and trade of every historian.

All the same, historians rarely learn (or teach) this important craft. It is relegated to specialists in foreign languages, and all too often, translators of our sources go unidentified, much less their practices discussed. Still further afield are translation studies in both theory and practice, not necessarily in any one language. Yet assessing a translation’s quality, if it occurs at all, demands a fully informed evaluation. Otherwise, malpractice can be egregious, like the inexplicable omission of 10 percent of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex) by its first American translator, who happened to be a biologist.

When evaluating such work as scholarship, the solution seems obvious. Why not include a reviewer with experience in translation from the relevant language? Many historians have rendered excerpts of their sources. Compared with modernists working in Western languages in the United States, ancient, medieval, and non-Western historians attend to these matters with more alacrity. Still better are colleagues who have published in the appropriate language.

Scholars, I wager, would welcome such peer review and its validation of their work. My book project is much better for engaging this expertise, and so would be the comparable efforts of other historians. For the sake of the general reader, however, let us also consider the implications of closely related fields of inquiry. I’m thinking here of the humanities like literary theory and of the social sciences like historical linguistics, among others. These interdisciplinary collaborations represent the future of historical practice, and they will help us all understand better both history in translation and translation in history.