This volume emanates from the second annual conference of the German Research Foundation priority programme 2130, ‘Early Modern Translation Cultures (1450–1800)’, and is devoted to an issue of increasing interest to translation researchers in recent years, especially to those concerned with translation theory.Footnote 1 The German term Übersetzungspolitiken comprises two different dimensions of meaning that equate to the English terms ‘politics’ and ‘policy’ of translation. This distinction is relevant not only because it allows us to differentiate between content, tasks, and goals on the one hand (policy), and processes, conflicts, and power structures on the other (politics), but also because for a number of years now within the discipline of translation studies, the term ‘translation policy’ has been primarily applied in association with the analysis of translation norms. In this respect, translation policy is first and foremost about the conditions that determine whether translations happen at all, and if they do, what form they take. It therefore addresses the fundamental question of why certain texts, images, and sign systems are translated, while others necessarily remain untranslated. Moreover, we need to ask which factors ultimately influence the specific form that translation takes, in the sense of a process of transmission from one semiotic and cultural system to another.

However, the semantic field designated by the binomial ‘policy/politics’ is of key importance for another reason: in addition to translation policy/ies (complete with the socio-cultural, economic, and intercultural factors that influence it/them), the role that translations play in political processes of negotiation and bargaining needs to be examined too. In other words, analysing the politics of translation in this second sense explores the connection between ‘translation’ and ‘politics’. This volume looks at a number of translation practices in the Early Modern period which, in addition to translations from one language to another (i.e. ‘translation proper’), concern translation in the material, aesthetic, intermedial, and ultimately cultural sense.

Both terms—the policy and politics of translation—allude to the fact that translations are always intertwined with the most diverse kinds of power structures and as such are not neutral operations. Postcolonial theorists, in particular, have pointed this out.Footnote 2 Of course, power can be effective in very different forms. Translations, for example, can be used as an instrument of repression, more specifically they can be regulated ‘from above’, and some translation policies may even prohibit certain kinds of translation.Footnote 3 Political power relationships are also expressed in cultural and linguistic systems and as such are likewise used to structure translations and translatability.Footnote 4 Hegemonial discursive patterns are reflected in translations, and the limits of what can be said become the limits of what can be translated.

If we look at the history of translation studies—which is still a young discipline—we can say that the political dimension of translations swiftly attracted strong interest thanks to the emergence of descriptive translation studies and, moreover, that it was initially discussed largely under the label ‘manipulation of literature’.Footnote 5 So, while the question of translation policy has attracted considerable interest at a theoretical level, it can be noted that research interests are mainly focussed on the twentieth century and the present day in terms of their specific historical dimension. Investigations into the policy and politics of translation that extend beyond this historical timeframe are comparatively rare.Footnote 6 This volume aims to help close that gap.

From a heuristic perspective, it seems to us that three aspects of the political dimension are of core importance and particularly suitable for structuring the articles in this volume. These concern, firstly, the cultural norms and criteria that decide what will actually be translated (cultural filters), secondly, the strategic political, religious, or economic interests associated with translations (calculation), and thirdly, the significance of translations for all kinds of interaction in the more limited sense of the political domain (diplomacy). These three aspects will be outlined in greater detail below.

2.1 Cultural Filters

An examination of the political processes that affect translations, in which translations are embedded and on whose behalf translations can occur, will of course tend to take an actor-centric approach. Investigating the processes of censorship, of translation programmes initiated by a whole range of institutions (such as royal courts, academies, religious orders, diplomatic missions, and even groups of scholars and publishers), and the functionalization of translations in political and religious debates—e.g. the much studied problem of Bible translations in the Reformation context—in particular suggests this kind of perspective and has also proven extraordinarily fruitful.Footnote 7

In addition, recent research has increasingly focused on those low-threshold and often unconscious mechanisms that play a crucial role in selecting what is actually translated in the first place. Gideon Toury has looked at these mechanisms as “preliminary norms” within the category of “translation policy”.Footnote 8 After all, translation cultures always imply selection mechanisms, which are influenced by certain ideas about what the target audience will find interesting, what can be integrated, and what is culturally compatible. It is this perspective that seems particularly apt for corroborating a strictly target-cultural approach, such as Toury sought to impose in translation theory. It is obvious that the question of what actually gets translated—and how—is generally determined by the target culture rather than by the source culture.

In the twentieth century, there are multiple examples of states, regimes, and cultural regions trying to influence how they are perceived abroad by promoting and controlling translation. And, of course, such attempts continue to exist. The few existing studies on this matter have admittedly revealed that these efforts have enjoyed somewhat limited success. This is true, for example, of the largely futile endeavours undertaken by the Nazi regime to use translation in order to promote the European spread of works by authors who were loyal or considered emblematic of their own culture,Footnote 9 and the same goes for the Fascist regime in Italy.Footnote 10 It is, in any case, a phenomenon of the modern era. As a rule of thumb, in the Early Modern period, with the exception of isolated cases where authors have themselves tried to promote and steer the translation of their own works abroad, decisions about what is to be translated have been more or less exclusively dependent on the target culture’s expectations and interests.

One exception—albeit an important one—in this respect concerns the translation activities that take place as part of missionary programmes. In this case, it is obviously not the target culture that determines the selection of texts to be translated, but rather the source culture. Toury’s postulation that translations are “facts of the target culture only” presumably needs to be reconsidered on this particular point. One might argue that these translations also function solely in the target culture, but would have to concede that the selection of texts and the way they are formulated, as in the case of the Jesuitical debate on accommodation, are controlled by the mechanisms and conditions of the source culture rather than by those of the target culture.Footnote 11

If we leave aside this important special case, we can say that the target culture’s expectations and interests which control translations have proven to be largely independent not merely of what could be regarded as the intrinsic qualities of the source text (the literary or artistic potential for innovation, originality, etc.) but also of its meaning in the source culture. To take an example from Italian studies: Why does a classic text of late eighteenth-century Italian literature such as Giuseppe Parini's Il Giorno exist in German only in a highly obscure relay translation via the French, while there are now a dozen different translations of Manzoni’s Promessi sposi? One might answer that this is due to Manzoni’s greater modernity, and in the process would have brought a new category into play that does indeed significantly influence the interest in translations in contemporary cultures. In the case of Parini and Manzoni, this aspect may derive its effect above all with respect to historical genre. While Parini’s criticism of Italian aristocratic society might even seem more modern in terms of social history than Manzoni’s providentialist Catholicism, the reception of Parini in other European countries may well have suffered in particular from his use of the epic poem as a genre. Manzoni, in contrast, relied on the novel genre, which would prove to be the future of literature both in Italy and elsewhere. The question of modernity admittedly reaches its limits when we note that half a dozen translations of the medieval Divina Commedia by Dante have appeared in Germany in the last two decades alone. So we can assume that other factors have to be considered too. In the case of our Parini example this might well concern how much of a link exists between the source culture and the cultural or real-life experience of the target audience. This would help to explain why Parini, who was strongly influenced by the French Enlightenment, was translated into French (and English) but less into German. The German interest in Manzoni, by contrast, may well have been due to his contacts with Goethe and his early reception in Goethe’s circle of acquaintances.

It is obvious that there are very different kinds of mechanisms filtering the perception and interest in foreign literature and cultures. But it is likewise clear that even where the corresponding translating decisions and strategies remain unarticulated, they direct the analytical interest to the underlying framework of social and cultural power structures.

The first and foremost mechanism here is undoubtedly the implicit or explicit prestige of a work, an author, or a culture. Of course, this prestige often reflects objective geopolitical power relationships and cultural spheres of influence. Yet it is equally the product of social value systems, hierarchies and canons in the target culture. The fact that Arabic scholars translated Greek philosophy and science attests to the first of these. But their translation of the Peripatetic philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Pythagorean Nicomachus of Gerasa, but not Sophocles, Aeschylus, or Euripides is evidence of the latter, testifying to a virtual autonomy from the standards of the source culture. It is also true of the Early Modern period: the number of translations is an unmistakeable indicator of shifts in prestige and power imbalances within European cultures. But what is perceived by a particular foreign culture and is received in translation, i.e. what is specifically found interesting, is essentially a product of the target culture’s patterns of perception.

Among these patterns of perception, foreignness or otherness and exoticism certainly play a particular role, but perceptions of demarcation and threat should not be underestimated either. Although these patterns can be found in almost all cultures, they are especially inscribed in Early Modern translation cultures, with their increasing efforts to map and appropriate the entire world via translation. The question of filters immediately follows on from questions about authorial empowerment, which have emerged from postcolonial studies to become a core focus. In this respect, the question of who is speaking and the question of who (by means of translation) is accorded the right to speak (even if not in his or her own language),Footnote 12 is a question of power par excellence.

2.2 Calculation

One succinct example of these associations is provided by the translation history of the Comentarios reales (1609/1617) by the mestizo Garcilaso Inca de la Vega in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The work, which is generally regarded as the first published document of pre-Columbian societies and the conquest of America from an Indigenous perspective—and as one of the few such existing pieces of evidence at all—has its roots in a complex process of translation, namely the detailed interpretation of Quechua terms and the transfer of orally transmitted bodies of Inca knowledge into Spanish and the European script. Translated into French by Jean Baudouin in 1633 (Paris: Courbé), the Comentarios reales would make its own ‘triumphal entry’ into France and western Europe in the first half of the eighteenth century thanks to the Enlightenment and its utilitarian ideas, and a fascination with the ‘exotic’ colonial world outside Europe. Improved or completely new translations of the Spanish work were successively published in Amsterdam (Kuyper, 1704) and Paris (Prault fils, 1744). In his preface, the translator of the Paris edition notes about the source text:

We are of the opinion that it can be of great use to society on account of the wonderful examples it contains testifying to the goodness, gentleness, justice, and moderation of the sovereign, and the docility, submissiveness, devotion, and respect shown by the subjects. (Transl. Tradukas)Footnote 13

The Dutch publisher states in turn: “There are few people of letters who do not know that the Histoire des Yncas, & de la Conquête du Pérou is as curious as it is rare.” [Transl. Tradukas].Footnote 14

Both quotations refer to the “preliminary norms” of translating Garcilaso Inca’s text. At the same time, cultural compatibility is linked to a further aspect, namely calculation in the sense of having a strategic economic interest in the translation. The text continues:

Whether in French or in Spanish, it [the Comentarios reales] has long been found only in a few private libraries, and the excessively high price paid for the text at auctions demonstrates the necessity of republishing it. [Transl. Tradukas]Footnote 15

The high demand for Garcilaso Inca’s text led the publishers to have high hopes that it would turn a profit. This aspect of calculation should be considered both with respect to the producers or initiators of translations and to the recipients. Moreover, it comes into play both as economic capital and as the cultural, social, and symbolic capital identified by Bourdieu.Footnote 16 The prospect of economic gain and/or renown played a role in the publisher’s decision for or against a translation, just as any existing social capital in the form of contacts to experienced translators and networks would also be taken into account. In terms of the target market, a publisher would want to scrutinize the economic and cultural capital of the intended readership as much as their potential wish to generate symbolic capital by acquiring translated works—which could include texts, graphic works, and even maps. The economic and cultural capital in particular influenced the formal and material shape that translated works took with regard to their scope and format, the linguistic or aesthetic register they used, the retention or relinquishment of termini technici, the addition of glossaries and illustrations, etc. Jean-Baptiste Ladvocat’s Dictionnaire géographique-portatif, for example, was a French geographical pocket dictionary (2nd ed., Paris, 1747) that was originally printed in octavo format. The Spanish translation (Madrid, 1750), however, appeared in the less convenient quarto format—a decision that the publisher justified by citing the constrictions of Spanish book production (such as an absence of certain printing types) as well as the preferences of the Spanish readership, which, he claimed, unlike the French audience was not interested in a pocket dictionary while travelling, but would gladly make use of a geographical work of reference while reading newspapers and histories.Footnote 17

Presenting these aspects allowed not only the translator but also the publisher to take centre stage as key figures in translation projects of the Early Modern period. He acted as an “entrepreneur of translation”,Footnote 18 who was able to tap into a global market by means of translation into various vernaculars or else pursue this goal by selecting a lingua franca (such as Latin or French). In many cases this kind of calculation by the publisher dovetailed with the power mechanisms and cultural compatibility sketched out above. To give one further example: encyclopaedic and scholarly texts of the Early Modern period would often contain an assurance that the translated work had been adapted to suit the target audience, which can be understood both as a means of advertising to increase turnover and as making a concession to cultural expectations and to what could (or could not) be said as determined by the discourse.

A comparative analysis of the source text and the translation could direct the focus towards the relationship between the different translation policies. Where do the premises of cultural integrability and economic calculation intersect? Where do they come into conflict with each other? Are there cases where something that is resistant/contrary (‘foreign’, ‘exotic’) or inexpressible (forbidden, taboo) in the source text becomes an element of the publisher’s translation policy? Where are procedures of “exoticizing translation”,Footnote 19 i.e. the deliberate transnational production of cultural differences between the object and subject of the reception (e.g. by not translating expressions from other languages), applied as a strategic means of increasing people’s desire to read a text and their interest in purchasing it? And conversely, where does the translation fail—even though from a publishing and/or political point of view (see below) it may well have made a profit—when confronted with the ‘resistance’ of the source text; in other words, where are the source and target cultures unbridgeable? And last but not least, attention must also be paid to translation projects that remained incomplete, i.e. ventures that foundered because of insufficient cultural, social, or economic capital on the part of the publisher and/or translator: perhaps due to financial resources being exhausted, subscribers failing to materialize, the absence of networks, or simply the commissioned translator lacking linguistic or cultural familiarity with the semiotic systems of the ‘source text’ (in the broadest sense of the term) and the target culture.

Addressing the matter more specifically from the perspective of the history of books or art, the aspect of calculation brings a material dimension to the fore. Compared with the source text, additions in the form of illustrations, cartographic material, embellishments, or ornamentation (or conversely, an absence of the same) become an integral element of translation policy—and hence of the critical analysis of it too. Where has capital in the narrower sense, and hence power, been generated not only by possession of the information contained within the translation but also by the purely material nature of the object? In which form did paratexts ultimately become an instrument for the translator to promote themselves as co-author, thereby serving as a means of empowerment? Did the translator reflect in the preface on his or her own role in the translated work; or did he or she choose additions to enhance the value of the translated work in comparison with the source text?

These considerations raise the question of the value placed on translations per se by a society at a specific point in time—in other words, the symbolic and cultural capital that they were basically accorded. This perspective includes the state promoting translations from other languages into its own vernacular just as much as the converse situation of retrospectively condemning translation activity as a ‘servile imitation’, which was how the ‘afrancesamiento’ movement was characterized in nineteenth-century Spain.Footnote 20

2.3 Diplomacy

As indicated above, within the context of this volume the field of diplomacy metonymically represents all forms of political communication in its narrow sense. From the Early Modern period onwards, translations thereby became a key tool in exercising dominion around the globe. While in medieval Europe translations of administrative or juridical texts already played a subordinate role due to the absolute predominance of Latin, during the transition from the late Middle Ages to the Early Modern period they increasingly became an everyday component of political practice, largely as the linguistic standardization and grammaticalization of vernacular languages progressed, swiftly followed by the vernacularization of the language of European administration. The link between grammaticalization and exercising power is expressed most clearly in the first ever grammar of a European vernacular language, namely Nebrija’s Gramática castellana of 1492, which was tellingly published in the same year that Columbus ‘discovered’ America. In the preface to this grammar, Nebrija addresses the Spanish king with the following words:

For soon Your Majesty will have imposed your yoke upon many barbarian peoples and foreign-tongued nations, and after the victory they will be compelled to accept the laws that the conqueror decrees for the conquered, and thus our language too, of which they should acquire knowledge by means of my grammar […]. [Transl. Tradukas]Footnote 21

It is this triad of grammaticalization, textualization, and media distribution through the invention of the printing press at the threshold of the Early Modern period that creates the modern notion of national languages as, in the words of Ivan Illich, the “separate and distinct cages in which we today think we are locked.”Footnote 22 And it is precisely this notion that produces the cultures of translation primarily addressed by SPP 2130 ‘Early Modern Translation Cultures’. Thus it is clear that political dimensions—and this is very much meant in the narrower definition—do not somehow become contingently attached to the issue of translation, but rather pervade the topic from the very start, as it were.

This applies not only to the way that states communicate with their subjects or with the peoples they rule, not only within a framework of internal communication between governments, and not only in economic relationships, but also in the contact between cultures and civilizations. Some key pieces of the jigsaw puzzle in these almost invariably asymmetrical communicative relationships pertaining to translation in the Early Modern period will be addressed in the articles that follow: translations as an instrument of power in the context of the Jesuit mission or Protestant missionary societies; the importance of translations in Spanish colonial policy in what we call today Mexico from the sixteenth century onwards; or the creation of maps of Japan against a background of Russian imperial policy in East Asia. These all reveal that in addition to the linguistic dimension in the narrower sense, there are paraverbal and nonverbal codes, rituals, maps, paintings, and architecture that play a crucial role in the processes of translation, decoding, and interpretation being examined here. And of course, all these processes also involve the question of how certain forms of alterity are constructed.

2.4 About the Articles

The volume starts with three articles on the thematic focus of Calculation between Politics and Policy.

Helge Perplies looks at the bilingual India Occidentalis collection from the Dutch publisher De Bry as a corpus based on multiple cultural, linguistic, and intermedial translation processes. Accounts of journeys through America in other languages were made accessible to a wider German-speaking audience in their vernacular German version, while at the same time Latin, in its capacity as a lingua franca, was aimed at a European readership. This collection of texts, which has long been interpreted as a Protestant propaganda tool, is now being examined from a new perspective: the article shows that the De Bry family, with an eye to their European and potentially Catholic target market, expunged some of the explosive religious and political potency from the source texts. At the same time, domesticating and exoticizing processes were applied to the translation in order to render it culturally compatible and arouse curiosity. Just as the authors determined how and to what extent cultural knowledge was translated from the ‘new’ to the ‘old world’, so too did the publishers act as ‘gatekeepers’ who tailored their collection to the market by selecting and editing the source texts.

Situated at the intersection of colonial discourse and translation practice, Martina Schrader-Kniffki, Yannic Klamp, and Malte Kneifel analyse Spanish–Zapotec missionary and notary texts dating from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in Central America. Starting with the linguistic aspects, they reconstruct specific translation processes, whereby social categorizations of the Indigenous American population are reflected by the colonial metropolises of Spain. The classification of the Indigenous people as personas miserables (“miserable persons”) and their concomitant legal status as wards led to some ambiguous effects: on the one hand, the metropolitan discourse assigned the Indigenous population to a place at the bottom of the social hierarchy, while on the other hand it gave them scope for action and thus empowerment: the Spanish image of the Indigenous population as personas miserables was adopted by the very people it labelled and strategically applied in juridical contexts, in order—within a situation governed by asymmetrical power relationships—to influence legal decisions. Colonial discourse and the external view of Indigenous people thus functioned as norms that shaped translation practices in New Spain in both directions.

Caroline Mannweiler uses the example of scholarly eighteenth-century translation from German to French to show how texts which were supposed to safeguard industrial competitiveness in the target culture, specifically in this case on the subject of optimizing local ore mining, also became the setting for a symbolic competition between (national) communities. The article draws attention to the paratexts of French translations, where an attempt is made to counter the scholarly relevance of the German source texts by invoking their ‘own’ [i.e. French] qualities by way of compensation, as it were, deploying the symbolic capital of French, among other things. The second thematic focus is Cultural Filters, which is represented by a total of six articles. Regina Toepfer concentrates on literary adaptations of ancient narrative material in sixteenth-century Germany, specifically Augsburg. Her article investigates Johannes Spreng’s treatment of the Europa and Alcyone myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, addressing the cultural filters of the Early Modern German bourgeoisie with respect to the gender-specific norms through which the narrative ancient world was perceived, and which were responsible for a translation that reinterpreted the female figures. A comparative analysis reveals the literary techniques and linguistic process used by Spreng to transform Ovid’s heroines into German ‘housewives’.

Elena Parina examines religious manuscripts from the so-called ‘Glamorgan School of Translation’, which comprise a corpus whose translation from English or Latin into Welsh has hitherto been primarily viewed as evidence of a kind of religious resistance among Catholic circles in Wales to the widescale enforcement of Protestantism in the Elizabethan age. The article takes a contrasting stance, arguing for more nuance in the hypothesis that these works have a clear, political pro-Catholic function. Some of the manuscripts turn out to be translations of pre-Reformation texts that cannot easily be classified within the context of confessional debates; in other cases, comparing the translation with the source text shows no evidence of a clear anti-Protestant position. Other aspects come to the fore with respect to the cultural filter of the translations, such as everyday piety and the conservatism of the target audience in the peripherally situated region of Wales.

Giulia Nardini looks at translations in the context of seventeenth-century Jesuit missions in South India. Her article views the mission as a contact zone, where differences are negotiated and cultural boundaries are transgressed or drawn. The mission situation proves to be a translation zone par excellence: descriptions of religious practices can be interpreted as documents of cultural transfer, or, vice versa, in terms of the incommensurability of cultural systems of signs and symbols. The example of the Informatio de quibusdam moribus nationis Indicae by Roberto Nobili, an Italian missionary in India, illustrates forms of cultural translation outlined as the mediation of specific collective value and symbolic systems. Nobili’s work, in which he petitioned the Roman Catholic church to support his mission, translated the practices and hierarchies of the Brahmins to suit the linguistic, religious, and social codes and registers of his target audience.

The role of book culture in the context of the Jesuit mission in Japan is at the heart of the article by Katja Triplett. Japanese prints produced by the Jesuits at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century are evidence of early attempts to translate both well-known and recently written texts for the Catholic mission in Japan. The article investigates the cultural filters that determined which texts were selected for translation and the way in which central Catholic teachings were presented. Letters and reports from Jesuit missionaries about translation policy, censorship, and cultural accommodation are analysed alongside printed Japanese translations of Thomas à Kempis’ popular devotional book Contemptus mundi.

In the article by Víctor de Castro León and Alberto Tiburcio the volume turns to cartography and the result of translation processes. The two authors focus on the sixteenth-century cartographic work of the North African Alī al-Sharafī and its relationship to the medieval chorography Nuzhat by the Arabic geographer al-Idrīsī. Starting from a multifaceted definition of translation as linguistic, intermedial, and cultural, the study presents al-Sharafī as a creative translator who adapted textual and visual quotations from al-Idrīsīs’ work and interlaced them with other cartographic sources and traditions. Transcriptions are invoked from the geographical description onto the map’s semiotic system, from the category of world map onto that of Portolan chart, and the shift in perspective from the world to the Mediterranean region. The processes of selection and translation that are foregrounded here thus evince multiple filters.

Cartography is also the focus of the article by Michaela Kästl, who looks at the third edition of Matteo Ricci’s world map (Kunyu Wanguo Quantu). Kästl analyses Ricci’s map as the result of processes of cultural negotiation and bilateral translation, concluding that it links the traditions of European Jesuitry and Chinese scholarship with the respective cartographic representations, which is why the map is re-embedded within both contexts of cultural history—and hence the respective implicit translation filter, too. The work’s collaborative construction process is manifested in the simultaneity and overlapping of various cultural and semiotic systems on the map. Given this background, Ricci’s map itself can be interpreted as a space for encounter and as a translation zone.

While that article provides an example of a successful translation between the European and Asian cultural spaces and between each of their cartographic traditions and norms, Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann and Ekaterina Simonova-Gudzenko present a case of missing translation between Asian and European cartography. Their analysis of the maps of Japan by Daikokuya Kodayu introduces the third and final thematic focus, namely Diplomacy and Power Structures.

The article traces the genesis of the cartographic manuscripts, starting from individual events in Kodayu’s life—a Japanese man who was shipwrecked in the 1780 s and ended up at the Russian court, where he was commissioned to produce maps. The documents, which were supposed to serve Russia’s political interests, remain a curiosity nonetheless: although the maps do contain linguistic translations, the graphic elements have not been transposed to a representational system that would have been familiar to Europeans. The article attributes this to the irreconcilability of the cartographic practices in Japan and Europe. In doing so it poses a fundamental question about the limits of translatability, or indeed the potential untranslatability of cultural sign, symbol, and value systems.

Mark Häberlein and Paula Manstetten focus on translation projects in the context of Protestant missions around 1700, specifically the activities of the pietistic Glauchasche Anstalten in Halle and the Anglican Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK). The article highlights the central role that translations were accorded in establishing networks between actors with respect to a common supranational mission policy: they made transnational communication possible, supported the reciprocal reception of writings and the mutual support of missionary activities, and last but not least they referenced shared notions of Protestant piety. The SPCK drew sufficient political strength from this kind of networking to commission the publication of the New Testament in Arabic—which added a further aspect to the complexity of Protestant translation policy.

Finally, there is Christina Strunck’s article examining the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, whose architecture and paintings—particularly the monumental mural by Antonio Verrio—can be interpreted as a complex project rooted in the visual artistic and political rivalry with France. Verrio made use of a French text, namely Roland Fréart de Chambray’s Parallèle de l’architecture antique et de la moderne, in the translated version by John Evelyn, in order to outdo the building’s French model—the Hôtel des Invalides—by basing it on Antique archetypes. Set against a background of the interlingual Fréart translation, the transfer processes analysed are interpreted in a variety of ways as inter- and intramedial translation processes.

The volume concludes with an afterword by Antje Flüchter and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink containing further considerations on the complex topic of translation politics and policy in the Early Modern period.