Paper long abstract:

Improving by Translating? The Contorted History of the English Translation of Ludwik Fleck's "Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact"

In 1979 the University of Chicago Press published an English translation of Ludwik Fleck's German book on the development of scientific facts first released in 1935 by the Swiss publisher Schwabe Verlag. Even though several editors and translators were in charge of the project or contributing to it - among them the well known scholars Robert Merton and Thomas Kuhn - it turned out to be a (linguistically) difficult task to catapult Fleck's book from the margins of "old Europe" to the heart of Anglo-American academic elite institutions and programs. All together it took five years to translate a book of 150 pages. The English speaking editors and translators complained about Fleck's neologisms, were suspicious that his neologisms and writing style betrayed an incomplete mastery of the German language, and finally decided that the English translation should "improve(s) upon Fleck so far as style, accuracy, and readability are concerned". They even considered not translating major concepts of the book like "thought style" or "thought collective" and cutting half of the book's original title. Which kind of Fleckian theory do we encounter, then, in the English translation? My talk will explore the "relational history" of the two books. By including new archival sources from Robert Merton's and Thaddeus Trenn's papers I will explore the cultural and linguistic difficulties of this trajectory between continents, cultures, religions, times, and languages.