Outward bound: women translators and scientific travel writing, 1780–1800

As the Enlightenment drew to a close, translation had gradually acquired an increasingly important role in the international circulation and transmission of scientific knowledge. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the translators responsible for making such accounts accessible in other languages, some of whom were women. In this article I explore how European women cast themselves as intellectually enquiring, knowledgeable and authoritative figures in their translations. Focusing specifically on the genre of scientific travel writing, I investigate the narrative strategies deployed by women translators to mark their involvement in the process of scientific knowledge-making. These strategies ranged from rhetorical near-invisibility, driven by women's modest marginalization of their own public engagement in science, to the active advertisement of themselves as intellectually curious consumers of scientific knowledge. A detailed study of Elizabeth Helme's translation of the French ornithologist Françoise le Vaillant's Voyage dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique [Voyage into the Interior of Africa] (1790) allows me to explore how her reworking of the original text for an Anglophone reading public enabled her to engage cautiously – or sometimes more openly – with questions regarding how scientific knowledge was constructed, for whom and with which aims in mind

Foreign credit: travel writing and authenticity in the dutch translation of The memoirs and travels of Mauritius Augustus, Count de Benyowsky (1790)

This article explores the translation and reception of the Memoirs and Travels (1790) of Count Mauritius Augustus Benyowsky (1746-86) in the Netherlands, and examines the complications, tensions and problems that transfer between a major and a more minor European language involves. I analyse how the Dutch translator Petrus Loosjes Adriaanszoon positioned himself as a mediator between these very different source and target cultures and ask how he dealt with the problems of plausibility and ‘credit’ which had beleaguered the reception of the Memoirs and Travels from the outset. In this article I am concerned to restore minority languages to the discussion of how travel literature circulated in Western Europe at the close of the eighteenth century and to demonstrate how major/minor language translation was central to the construction of Dutch-language culture in the Low Countries in this period

The Kinematics of CIV in Star-Forming Galaxies at z~1.2

We present the first statistical sample of rest-frame far-UV spectra of star-forming galaxies at z~1. These spectra are unique in that they cover the high-ionization CIV{\lambda}{\lambda}1548, 1550 doublet. We also detect low-ionization features such as SiII{\lambda}1527, FeII{\lambda}1608, AlII{\lambda}1670, NiII{\lambda}{\lambda}1741, 1751 and SiII{\lambda}1808, and intermediate-ionization features from AlIII{\lambda}{\lambda}1854, 1862. Comparing the properties of absorption lines of lower- and higher- ionization states provides a window into the multi-phase nature of circumgalactic gas. Our sample is drawn from the DEEP2 survey and spans the redshift range 1.01 < z < 1.35 ( = 1.25). By isolating the interstellar CIV absorption from the stellar P-Cygni wind profile we find that 69% of the CIV profiles are blueshifted with respect to the systemic velocity. Furthermore, CIV shows a small but significant blueshift relative to FeII (offset of the best-fit linear regression -76 $\pm$ 26 km/s). At the same time, the CIV blueshift is on average comparable to that of MgII{\lambda}{\lambda}2796, 2803. At this point, in explaining the larger blueshift of CIV absorption at the ~ 3-sigma level, we cannot distinguish between the faster motion of highly-ionized gas relative to gas traced by FeII, and filling in on the red side from resonant CIV emission. We investigate how far-UV interstellar absorption kinematics correlate with other galaxy properties using stacked spectra. These stacking results show a direct link between CIV absorption and the current SFR, though we only observe small velocity differences among different ionization states tracing the outflowing ISM.Comment: 21 pages, 14 figures, ApJ, accepte

Harold in Germany, Vita in Love: Stories from Sissinghurst's Library

This working paper was produced for the exhibition ‘Affairs in Berlin’, held at Sissinghurst Castle and Garden (National Trust), 26 September 2022-17 February 2023. The exhibition was made possible through a UCL CCHS (Centre for Critical Heritage Studies) Small Grant. The project leads were Kathryn Batchelor (UCL) and Eleanor Black (National Trust). The co-convenors were Lesley Chamberlain and Rowena Willard-Wright