Translation and methodological nationalism: tracing translators in late eighteenth-century radicalism

There is a tendency, in translation studies, to assume the existence of discrete national cultures between which the translator operates. What we can call the ‘methodological nationalism’ at the heart of the discipline can be found in the dualism of the language and presuppositions of some of the founding paradigms of the discipline such as ‘source’ and ‘target’ texts and cultures, cultural systems and domestication and foreignization. Increasingly, however, the presuppositions of stable national cultures and languages have come under scrutiny: through constructivist perspectives on national identity since the work of Benedict Anderson and through recent work on ‘translingualism’ in the work of Canagaraja and others. This paper looks at translation and translators in late eighteenth-century Britain and France within the historical and geographical framework of the ‘Atlantic Revolutions’. It considers translation as functioning more in the context of the circulation of ideas than in a dialogue between discrete national cultures, challenging the usefulness of perspectives basing themselves on methodological nationalism.