Found in translation: Foreign travel and linguistic difference in the eighteenth century

Translation plays a central role in the intellectual life and letters of eighteenth-century Britain. The necessity of communicating with others during a period in which British travelers encounter a diversity of languages and cultures, results in an increased desire for translations and a greater engagement with the problematics of translation. Introducing new concepts and modes of expression to English, translation expands the linguistic and intellectual horizons of the language. Translation, especially of classical works, has long been important in English literature. However, this dissertation argues that inherited models of translation prove insufficient in the eighteenth century as the British encounter a bewildering array of living languages that bear no syntactical or lexical affinity to European tongues. Though translation functions as the necessary currency for fluent exchange in the new global economy, it is discovered to be a more difficult task than previously imagined. Foreign exploration, though it imports material and intellectual riches into the British nation, reinforces a sense of a world fragmented by mutually incomprehensible languages. Such discoveries prompt a crisis in translation.;This dissertation examines instances that operate as paradigmatic responses to the cultural dilemma of translation. First, I turn my attention to travel accounts, both factual and fictional, for these demonstrate the immediate problem of communicating with foreign cultures and languages. Chapter one studies three translated accounts of voyages to Japan, a nation that deliberately attempts to limit all translation and to remain linguistically closed. Denying Japan its radical alterity, these texts translate the exotic into familiar tropes and idioms. Chapter two examines Robinson Crusoe's unrealistic fantasy of linguistic erasure and imposition, which functions as an extreme version of the concept of translation. Chapter three considers Captain Cook's descriptions of his voyages to the South Pacific and how, in the absence of a shared language, any idealized notion of perfect understanding is repeatedly undercut by instances of mistranslation and miscommunication. The concluding chapter on Johnson's Dictionary shifts focus to discuss the influence of translation and foreign languages on the English language. Ultimately, translation is discovered to be a mutual process that transforms both languages.