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Article published In: Target
Vol. 32:1 (2020) ► pp.59–82

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Retranslating Thucydides as a scientific historian

A corpus-based analysis

ORCiD logo with link | University of Manchester
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 21 November 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/target.19082.jon
Abstract
The nineteenth century was a period of dramatic change in Europe for the idea of history. While from antiquity through to the eighteenth century, historiography had broadly been considered an artistic and rhetorical activity, this view gradually lost ground in the nineteenth century to an understanding of history as a science. This case study aims to explore how these shifts in attitudes towards the proper aims and methods of history writing might have shaped the interpretation and translation into English of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, a work first written in classical Greek in the fifth century BCE. The analysis is carried out by means of a corpus-based methodology which, I argue, can better enable researchers to engage with each (re)translator’s overall presentation of the source through the production and interrogation of concordances listing every instance of a given search item as it occurs within digitised versions of the target texts. This is demonstrated through an investigation of the use of the term ‘fact(s)’ which reveals a striking divergence in interpretation between the six translations, with Crawley, Richard. 1874. History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. London: Longmans, Green and Co.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar History in particular appearing to lend a significantly more objective and empirical tone to Thucydides in English.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Thucydides’ History
  • 3.Translating Thucydides
  • 4.“Looked at by the light of facts”
  • 5.A corpus-based methodology
  • 6.Frequency analysis
  • 7.Concordance analysis
    • 7.1 Hobbes ([1629] 1843)
    • 7.2 Smith (1753)
    • 7.3 Bloomfield (1829)
    • 7.4 Dale (1848)
    • 7.5 Crawley (1874)
    • 7.6 Jowett (1881)
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
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