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Paper short abstract

Could Von Sydow’s notion of ecotype illuminate how the “foundational myths” of translation circulate in the history of translation theorization? Viewed as ecotypization, their use in scholarship reveals how translation theory evolves through adaptation, localization, and refunctionalization.

Paper long abstract

Von Sydow’s notion of ecotype offers a productive heuristic for examining the narratives that shape the prehistory of translation theorization. Translation historiography, as Bassnett (2014), Pym (2018), and Hermans (2007) have observed, is often sustained by narratives whose use and function resemble those of foundational myths: the miracle of the Septuagint, the self-fashioning of the Renaissance humanist translator, or the belief in inevitable loss in translation, among others. Once mobilized by translators and scholars, these narratives do not remain static; instead, they undergo continual processes of cultural adaptation, assuming distinct ideological and institutional functions in diverse contexts. The Septuagint legend, for instance, is reinterpreted in Hellenistic Judaism, early Christianity, and Enlightenment philology, each time reconfigured to authorize specific conceptions of linguistic truth and textual legitimacy. Similarly, narratives of fidelity and betrayal recur across cultural traditions, yet are inflected by localized perceptions of authority, creativity, and identity.

In this panel, I propose an ecotypical perspective on the “foundation myths” of translation theorization, offering new insights into the dynamics of circulation, localization, and refunctionalization of migratory narratives that have underpinned the history of translation theory. This approach reframes the history of theorization not as a linear succession of canonical episodes, but as a narrative field of cultural adaptation in which globally recognizable story patterns acquire situated forms that both reflect and shape disciplinary self-understanding. Thus, Von Sydow’s ecotype framework could provide translation studies with a comparative methodology for analyzing how translational myths travel, persist, and mutate across time and space.