1. This book is one of the products of a Multilateral Project funded by the European Commission under the label of the LLP/Erasmus Programme for the years 2011-2013. The title of this project was "EE-T. Economic e-Translations into and from European Languages. An Online Platform" (518297-LLP-2011-IT-ERASMUS-FEXI). The project was coordinated by Marco Guidi at the Department of Economics and Management of the University of Pisa . Other partners were, from East to West: the Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa (José Luis Cardoso); the Departament d'Història i Institucions Econòmiques, Universitat de Barcelona (Javier San Julián); the Phare, Université de Paris Panthéon Sorbonne (Nathalie Sigot); the Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre, Universität Hohenheim; the Technological Educational Institution of Messolongi (Spiros Sirmakessis); the Universitaea din Bucuresti (Georgeta Ion), and the Middle East Technical University, Ankara (Cinla Akdere), plus two technical partners, Pixel, Florence (Elisabetta Delle Donne) and Connectis, Florence (Riccardo Rossi). The action of the Erasmus Programme in which the EE-T project was hosted was innovative and aimed to promote one of the strategic goals of the Europe 2020 programme of the European Union: the so-called ???triangle of knowledge??? between research, education and innovation. This goal moves from the remark that, in a knowledge-based society, economic performances depend on innovation, and innovation depends on the quality of both research and education. Fostering excellence in education, especially in higher education, implies reducing the time-to-transfer of advanced research results to educational programmes and educational methods. By increasing the students??? familiarity with updated research, their ability to innovate is powerfully stimulated, as innovative thinking is always the development of the ???adjacent possible??? to the knowledge that has already been accumulated (Johnson 2010). With this inspiration in the background, our project aimed to demonstrate at one and the same time that the domain of innovation in research includes the humanities and social sciences and not only hard sciences and technology, that the results of innovative research in these domains can be meaningfully transferred to educational programmes, and that humanity and social science studies can produce further innovation by encouraging students to exploit the treasure of ideas, texts, images accumulated through history, for original and unpredictable ventures. The thousands of texts that have been produced in past centuries in specific domains of knowledge ??? once treated with the help of digital technologies ??? become an invaluable source not only for research, but also for applications in the fields of linguistics, lexicography, artificial intelligence, or as content-tanks for journalists, politicians, administrators, managers, etc. It is essential for this reason to teach students not only to learn the basic contents of the discipline they are studying, but also to manipulate these contents, to obtain the best from the information available in the web, and to use all these materials to generate new ideas and new initiatives. On the other hand, researchers, when planning their work, must understand that an essential part of it consists of sharing their results with students and to involve them in their research activity. The University of Pisa, in the academic years 2011-2012 and 2012-2013, has been the theatre of some interesting experiments connected to the EE-T project. Let us start from what was more innovative in the research side of this project. The project was about translations of political economy works as an instrument for the dissemination of economic ideas in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This topic was selected to stimulate cooperation and cross-fertilisation among scholars in economics and scholars in history, philology, literature and linguistics. On the one hand, economists and historians of economics normally approach past texts as theoretical sources, or to study the relationships between their contents and the historical context in which they appear. Their typical questions are the relationships between past theories and contemporary theories, or, in a more historical vein, the contribution of economic ideas to policy making, the relationships between economic ideas and philosophical inspirations, etc. On the other hand, linguists who study languages for special purposes (LSPs) may be interested in economic texts as sources for lexicology or discourse analysis; and historians of literatures may be interested in economic texts as literary performances associated to artistic, literary or cultural movements. The challenge of our project was to put such different scholars at work together, around common topics of research, to discover what economists had to learn from linguists and belletrists and what the latter had to learn from economists about the way to approach, destructure and analyse economic texts. But the project has mobilised more than investigation. Students have been partially involved in the research activities of the group, and courses have been temporarily adapted in order to host the innovative educational methods that the project actively promoted. They have been taught to contribute to the database of the project with original entries, they have digitalised documents for the EE-T website, they have produced reading guides to translations, dissertations and video-lectures. They have attended interdisciplinary classes and participated in workshops and public conferences to disseminate the project. It is too soon to measure the effect of such an involvement. But we already know that the students??? level of satisfaction for these courses was high. If we consider the eight research units composing the project team, the workshops and the final conference organised in Pisa in September 2013, we can state that the project has produced more than a hundred papers, a large database and a series of educational materials hosted in the EE-T website. This book has a special story within the project. It is one of the results of the research activity of the Pisa unit, including not only the group of researchers of this institution, but also some of its ???associated partners??? in Italy (specifically, the University of Milan, the University of Palermo, and the University of Roma ???Tor Vergata???). The book was originally planned as a report of the first year of activity, and its original aim was to present some early outcomes of our investigations, delaying to more structured publications the production of more definitive results. And although the book appears when the project is over and most participants are engaged in publishing other contributions, it still maintains some of the features of a report. Its aim is to introduce the reader to a method of approaching economic texts that involves the cooperation of specialists of different disciplines, specifically, historians of economics, linguists and historians of literature. It shows how each scholar viewed these texts, the background of studies each of them offered to raise common research questions and to produce significant interpretations, the ways in which different approaches cross-fertilised each other, and finally the problems that scholars of different disciplines encountered in mixing up and learning to work jointly. Despite their scholarly presentation, most contributions to this volume are quite experimental. In a way, they offer a test for scholars in humanities and social sciences to verify how open their respective points of view are to fecundation by neighbouring disciplines. Unfortunately, some recent experiences in presenting analogous papers to conferences or in submitting articles to academic journals have revealed a surprising narrow-mindedness in those who were asked to judge. It has been not infrequent to be asked how textual, stylistic and linguistic analysis can contribute to the history of ideas, or reciprocally how detailed ???digressions??? about economic notions and economic theories can add new meanings to a literary or linguistic analysis of texts. Not infrequently journal referees and editors ask to cut the ???spurious??? parts as a condition to be accepted in their publication. And the justification is that the readers of those journals ???expect??? to be informed about what is relevant to their disciplinary domain and to their typical research questions, while they are not interested in different approaches. Maybe we will sometimes comply with what discussant and referees usually demand. We will produce more focused papers for disciplinary journals, papers that respond to a single-discipline question. But at least in this book we feel extraordinary free to move across disciplines and to show how different approaches can improve our understanding of texts: of their contents, methods, styles and languages at the same time. Free to take seriously ??? and patiently ??? what complementary approaches have to say, and to enjoy it. This qualification is not intended to diminish the value of the papers included in the present collection: all of them are scholarly made, original, and approved by a blind referees. We only wish to invite readers to approach them with an open mind, as experiments of a cross-disciplinary research that scholars with different backgrounds have learned to do working side by side for more than two years. 2. Seen from the point of view of the history of economics, translations are an aspect of the broader process of international circulation of economic ideas. This process is in turn connected to the phenomenon of the institutionalisation and popularisation of political economy, a science that, since its origins, has aimed to contribute to creating a public opinion, and, once created, enlightening it on the ???nature and causes of the wealth of nations???, to recall the title of Adam Smith???s major work. Such an enlightenment was considered essential to provide the public opinion with weapons to judge and influence the government???s engagement in favouring the opulence and power of nations and the welfare of citizens . The content of the message conveyed by political economy was variable along time. In the 18th century the main focus was on the ability of the sovereign and its ministers to promote welfare through emulation, protection of national industry, jealousy of trade, colonial expansion, and war. At the beginning of the 19th century this attitude progressively faded away, replaced by the new gospel of laissez-faire, a vision that it would be limited to confine to the argument that markets are efficient in coordinating individual decisions and generating the ???unintended result??? of social welfare. What is reversed in this new consensus is the conception of government as the result of the visible hand of a paternal sovereign. There is a ???governmentality??? in the natural laws of commerce and population that imposes itself as an impersonal and unalterable necessity, obliging individuals and governments to follow the virtuous path marked by them (Foucault 2004 a, 2004 b). This vision was in turn partially reversed by the critical attitudes that, both on the left and on the right wing of the political spectrum, arose in the last decades of the 19th century as a response to the so-called ???social question???, the dark side of the expansion generated by the industrial revolution and the development of world trade. And further evolutions occurred in the early 20th century as a response to the dramatic consequences of wars, revolutions and totalitarianisms. The communication of these messages was the product of individuals and networks who actively promoted not only the spread of economic ideas, but also the creation of institutions that, both in civil society and in government, translated these ideas into new programmes and actions, with a view to generating welfare, justice, and progress. And the point is that an important part of this process of social construction was represented not only by successful ideas and ideologies, but also by consistent languages and tropes shared by entire communities, through which social mechanisms and the behaviour of individuals and groups were represented. There is no social organisation without a coherent representation of it in the mind of participants, and there is no representation without a coherent language. It is in this way that historians of economics meet experts in linguistics and literature, and feel an increasing necessity to cooperate with them. A second, specific reason for this cooperation is determined by the typical transnational dimension of the spread of economic ideas and economic institutions. The maps traced by historical demographers for the expansion of the great viral diseases of the past across national borders are a model that could be applied to the circulation of economic notions and languages, and to the transmigration and adaptation of successful economic institutions to new contexts. Translations of treatises, textbooks, pamphlets and journal articles are essential elements of this virality (Guidi 2013). Historians of economics have started to pay attention to translations as vehicles for the circulation of economic ideas and tools for the promotion of ideologies, political programmes, and class or group interests (see Reinert 2011). The cooperation with experts of languages and literature dramatically improves the understanding of these phenomena, by encouraging a more in-depth contrastive analysis of the source and target texts, of their internal structures and paratextual apparatuses, and of terminology, syntax and rhetoric. If language is the backbone of the social construction of reality, the migration of terms, tropes and slang is the fuel of institutional imitation and adaptation. It is a fact that neologisms are often the product of translations, or of those individuals and circles that produced translations. But neologisms and new languages are successful and survive (at least for a certain time) only provided that they are actively spoken in relevant contexts. This is an additional reason for promoting and constantly feeding a common area of research between experts of economics and experts of languages. 3. Researchers on LSPs know but too well how indispensable is the cooperation among scholars of the areas they investigate. And those who deal with LSPs in a diachronic perspective know too that they need to cooperate with experts in the fields they study from a linguistic point of view. For this reason, as anticipated above, the EE-T project was a happy albeit rare opportunity for hybridising different types of knowledge, through collaboration among historians of economics, linguists, and specialists in inter-linguistic translation. Terminology specialists and linguists studying the economic discourse offer to the historians of economic sciences a more in-depth understanding of the phenomena they are interested in: we should never forget that texts are made up of words which have an origin, grow up and sometimes die. On the other hand, the intellectual, historical and ideological background of specialists in the history of economics allows LSP scholars to better contextualise the origin of a term and ??? understanding its reason ??? to discover meanings that were not prima facie evident. Languages speak about the world, they represent it and contribute to modify it. They give a name to notions that were unfamiliar to one culture, although they were well known by another culture. Languages are not fixed once and for all. They are submitted to continuous change: it is very often necessary to create neologisms to define new situations and concepts, and equally often these new words are ephemeral, just because they are connected to a circumscribed historical and social moment (Álvarez de Miranda 2009). Texts too, being composed of words, are dynamic objects: it is unavoidable to re-translate texts that were already translated in the past, in order to adapt them to the language in use. It is also indispensable to reformulate ancient texts, in order to continue to read them (Monti e Schnyder 2011). No text can be considered fixed, and this is true also for the economic texts on which the EE-T project was focused. These texts were carriers of ideas and concepts of which interlinguistic translation allowed not only the circulation, but also the evolution, since changes of languages always imply adaptation. The modern distinction between author and translator was unknown until the 19th century, and this phenomenon in a way makes it ???obligatory??? for scholars in specialistic translation and for scholars in the history of economists to cooperate. The discrepancy between original work and translator???s interventions must be carefully examined (Hermans 1985), and the study of terminological choices is relevant to understanding the role that a translation had in the development and circulation of economic ideas in a given society. It goes without saying that in some cases silence is the loudest voice, and the omission of a passage can be more significant than an interpolation. This book collects contributions by linguists, philologists and historians of economics. The main message it aims to convey is that no scholar is a monad, and that only by sharing specialistic knowledge we can enrich individual research and contribute to a more comprehensive didactics. 4. The papers collected in this book offer themselves as examples of the above described cross-disciplinary methodology. Matteo Lefèvre presents a study of the multilingual dictionary entitled Sex linguarum dilucidissimus dictionarius, published in Venice in 1541. The analysis focuses on the Italian and Spanish economic vocabularies, which are examined exploring their connection with the cultural and social context of the city and with the ideal of utilitas. Giulia Bianchi explores the Italian and French translations of David Hume???s Political Discourses along three centuries, in order to show the interesting pattern they reveal in the history of the interpretation of Hume???s works: in the eighteenth century Hume was considered a political writer, in the nineteenth century a historian and in the twentieth century a philosopher. Elena Carpi deals with the Italian translations of some writings of the Spanish economist Valentín de Foronda, published between 1788 and 1790. Carpi considers polyphony as a structural element of the translation process and of the ideological use of the text, of which she highlights the linguistic manipulation. Marco Cini studies the beginnings of the debate on the political economy in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany during the 1820s, that it was fuelled by the translation of numerous articles by British and French economists. The importation of the main controversies of the time on production and consumption is contextualised in the economic and intellectual background of 19th-century Tuscany, showing the evolution of the economic discourse from an enthusiastic adoption of laissez-faire ideas to a concern with the social and institutional dimension of economic development based on the philosophy of Giandomenico Romagnosi. Cristina Guccione examines the first and second series of the ???Biblioteca dell???Economista???, edited by Francesco Ferrara, as an early corpus of specialized translation. It considers the different text-types included in this series, and the influence of English on the early evolution of the Italian language of economics. An overview of the translation work shows how this important venture could be exploited for linguistic, translational and contrastive research. Marco Guidi and Monica Lupetti present a study on the Brazilian translation of Primi elementi di economia politica, published by Luigi Cossa in 1875. The innovative eclectic approach adopted by the authors is based on the assumption that the joint study of the circulation of economic ideas and of the linguistic tools for learning is indispensable for understanding the traductologic context of this work. Two contributions study the fortune of the translations of a curious small book by Otto Hübner, entitled Der kleine Volkswirth, published in German in 1852, and addressed to schoolchildren who, for the first time, approached the subject of political economy. This elementary textbook enjoyed an extraordinary fortune throughout the world, as it probably interpreted a point of view on economic relationships that was popular in the mid-nineteenth century . Carolina Flinz offers a stylistic analysis of the Italian translation (1854-1855), submitting it to a contrastive study. The paper focuses on the comparison between the mictrostructures of the source-text and of the target-text, in order to highlight the variation of register and of linguistic function. Alessandra Ghezzani explores the complex derivation of the Spanish translations of Der kleine Volkswirth published in Chile, Uruguay and Argentina in the 1860s and 1870s from various editions of the French translation; her contribution connects the spread of this synthetic textbook of political economy to the ideological context of the rise of Nation States in Hispanic America. Fabrizio Bientinesi examines the case of two different Italian translations of J.E. Cairnes??? Principles that were published in 1877 and 1878. The first translation, by Sidney Sonnino and Leopoldo Franchetti, was aimed at supporting their political agenda. The second translation was published in the series entitled ???Biblioteca dell???Economista???, edited by Gerolamo Boccardo, in a volume dedicated to methodological issues. The study demonstrates that there was no competition between these translations, which were done for different purposes. Pisa, June 2014 Elena Carpi, Marco E.L. Guidi References J. Astigarraga, J. Usoz (eds), L???économie politique et la sphère publique dans le débat des Lumières, Madrid, Rústica - Casa de Velázquez, 2013. P. Álvarez de Miranda, Neología y pérdida léxica, in E. de Miguel (ed.), Panorama de la lexicología, Barcelona, Ariel, 2009, pp. 133-158. M. Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population. Cours au Collège de France. 1977-1978, Paris, Gallimard-Seuil, 2004a. M. Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France. 1978-1979, Paris, Gallimard-Seuil, 2004b. M.E.L. Guidi, Attori traduttori e reti: la circolazione dell???economia politica in Europa e nel mondo attraverso le traduzioni (XIX-XX secolo), in M. Lupetti, V. Tocco (eds), Traduzione e autotraduzione: un percorso attraverso i generi letterari, Pisa, Ets 2013, pp. 197-216. S. Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come from, New York, Riverhead Books, 2010. Th. Hermans (ed.), The Manipulation of Literature. Studies in Literary Translation, London and Sydney, Croom Helms, 1985. E. Monti, P. Schnyder (eds), Autour de la retraduction: Perspectives littéraires européennes, Paris, Orizons, 2011. S. Reinert, Translating Empire. Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2011.
Languages of Political Economy. Cross-disciplinary Studies on Economic Translations
CARPI, ELENA;GUIDI, MARCO ENRICO LUIGI
2014-01-01
Abstract
1. This book is one of the products of a Multilateral Project funded by the European Commission under the label of the LLP/Erasmus Programme for the years 2011-2013. The title of this project was "EE-T. Economic e-Translations into and from European Languages. An Online Platform" (518297-LLP-2011-IT-ERASMUS-FEXI). The project was coordinated by Marco Guidi at the Department of Economics and Management of the University of Pisa . Other partners were, from East to West: the Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa (José Luis Cardoso); the Departament d'Història i Institucions Econòmiques, Universitat de Barcelona (Javier San Julián); the Phare, Université de Paris Panthéon Sorbonne (Nathalie Sigot); the Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre, Universität Hohenheim; the Technological Educational Institution of Messolongi (Spiros Sirmakessis); the Universitaea din Bucuresti (Georgeta Ion), and the Middle East Technical University, Ankara (Cinla Akdere), plus two technical partners, Pixel, Florence (Elisabetta Delle Donne) and Connectis, Florence (Riccardo Rossi). The action of the Erasmus Programme in which the EE-T project was hosted was innovative and aimed to promote one of the strategic goals of the Europe 2020 programme of the European Union: the so-called ???triangle of knowledge??? between research, education and innovation. This goal moves from the remark that, in a knowledge-based society, economic performances depend on innovation, and innovation depends on the quality of both research and education. Fostering excellence in education, especially in higher education, implies reducing the time-to-transfer of advanced research results to educational programmes and educational methods. By increasing the students??? familiarity with updated research, their ability to innovate is powerfully stimulated, as innovative thinking is always the development of the ???adjacent possible??? to the knowledge that has already been accumulated (Johnson 2010). With this inspiration in the background, our project aimed to demonstrate at one and the same time that the domain of innovation in research includes the humanities and social sciences and not only hard sciences and technology, that the results of innovative research in these domains can be meaningfully transferred to educational programmes, and that humanity and social science studies can produce further innovation by encouraging students to exploit the treasure of ideas, texts, images accumulated through history, for original and unpredictable ventures. The thousands of texts that have been produced in past centuries in specific domains of knowledge ??? once treated with the help of digital technologies ??? become an invaluable source not only for research, but also for applications in the fields of linguistics, lexicography, artificial intelligence, or as content-tanks for journalists, politicians, administrators, managers, etc. It is essential for this reason to teach students not only to learn the basic contents of the discipline they are studying, but also to manipulate these contents, to obtain the best from the information available in the web, and to use all these materials to generate new ideas and new initiatives. On the other hand, researchers, when planning their work, must understand that an essential part of it consists of sharing their results with students and to involve them in their research activity. The University of Pisa, in the academic years 2011-2012 and 2012-2013, has been the theatre of some interesting experiments connected to the EE-T project. Let us start from what was more innovative in the research side of this project. The project was about translations of political economy works as an instrument for the dissemination of economic ideas in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This topic was selected to stimulate cooperation and cross-fertilisation among scholars in economics and scholars in history, philology, literature and linguistics. On the one hand, economists and historians of economics normally approach past texts as theoretical sources, or to study the relationships between their contents and the historical context in which they appear. Their typical questions are the relationships between past theories and contemporary theories, or, in a more historical vein, the contribution of economic ideas to policy making, the relationships between economic ideas and philosophical inspirations, etc. On the other hand, linguists who study languages for special purposes (LSPs) may be interested in economic texts as sources for lexicology or discourse analysis; and historians of literatures may be interested in economic texts as literary performances associated to artistic, literary or cultural movements. The challenge of our project was to put such different scholars at work together, around common topics of research, to discover what economists had to learn from linguists and belletrists and what the latter had to learn from economists about the way to approach, destructure and analyse economic texts. But the project has mobilised more than investigation. Students have been partially involved in the research activities of the group, and courses have been temporarily adapted in order to host the innovative educational methods that the project actively promoted. They have been taught to contribute to the database of the project with original entries, they have digitalised documents for the EE-T website, they have produced reading guides to translations, dissertations and video-lectures. They have attended interdisciplinary classes and participated in workshops and public conferences to disseminate the project. It is too soon to measure the effect of such an involvement. But we already know that the students??? level of satisfaction for these courses was high. If we consider the eight research units composing the project team, the workshops and the final conference organised in Pisa in September 2013, we can state that the project has produced more than a hundred papers, a large database and a series of educational materials hosted in the EE-T website. This book has a special story within the project. It is one of the results of the research activity of the Pisa unit, including not only the group of researchers of this institution, but also some of its ???associated partners??? in Italy (specifically, the University of Milan, the University of Palermo, and the University of Roma ???Tor Vergata???). The book was originally planned as a report of the first year of activity, and its original aim was to present some early outcomes of our investigations, delaying to more structured publications the production of more definitive results. And although the book appears when the project is over and most participants are engaged in publishing other contributions, it still maintains some of the features of a report. Its aim is to introduce the reader to a method of approaching economic texts that involves the cooperation of specialists of different disciplines, specifically, historians of economics, linguists and historians of literature. It shows how each scholar viewed these texts, the background of studies each of them offered to raise common research questions and to produce significant interpretations, the ways in which different approaches cross-fertilised each other, and finally the problems that scholars of different disciplines encountered in mixing up and learning to work jointly. Despite their scholarly presentation, most contributions to this volume are quite experimental. In a way, they offer a test for scholars in humanities and social sciences to verify how open their respective points of view are to fecundation by neighbouring disciplines. Unfortunately, some recent experiences in presenting analogous papers to conferences or in submitting articles to academic journals have revealed a surprising narrow-mindedness in those who were asked to judge. It has been not infrequent to be asked how textual, stylistic and linguistic analysis can contribute to the history of ideas, or reciprocally how detailed ???digressions??? about economic notions and economic theories can add new meanings to a literary or linguistic analysis of texts. Not infrequently journal referees and editors ask to cut the ???spurious??? parts as a condition to be accepted in their publication. And the justification is that the readers of those journals ???expect??? to be informed about what is relevant to their disciplinary domain and to their typical research questions, while they are not interested in different approaches. Maybe we will sometimes comply with what discussant and referees usually demand. We will produce more focused papers for disciplinary journals, papers that respond to a single-discipline question. But at least in this book we feel extraordinary free to move across disciplines and to show how different approaches can improve our understanding of texts: of their contents, methods, styles and languages at the same time. Free to take seriously ??? and patiently ??? what complementary approaches have to say, and to enjoy it. This qualification is not intended to diminish the value of the papers included in the present collection: all of them are scholarly made, original, and approved by a blind referees. We only wish to invite readers to approach them with an open mind, as experiments of a cross-disciplinary research that scholars with different backgrounds have learned to do working side by side for more than two years. 2. Seen from the point of view of the history of economics, translations are an aspect of the broader process of international circulation of economic ideas. This process is in turn connected to the phenomenon of the institutionalisation and popularisation of political economy, a science that, since its origins, has aimed to contribute to creating a public opinion, and, once created, enlightening it on the ???nature and causes of the wealth of nations???, to recall the title of Adam Smith???s major work. Such an enlightenment was considered essential to provide the public opinion with weapons to judge and influence the government???s engagement in favouring the opulence and power of nations and the welfare of citizens . The content of the message conveyed by political economy was variable along time. In the 18th century the main focus was on the ability of the sovereign and its ministers to promote welfare through emulation, protection of national industry, jealousy of trade, colonial expansion, and war. At the beginning of the 19th century this attitude progressively faded away, replaced by the new gospel of laissez-faire, a vision that it would be limited to confine to the argument that markets are efficient in coordinating individual decisions and generating the ???unintended result??? of social welfare. What is reversed in this new consensus is the conception of government as the result of the visible hand of a paternal sovereign. There is a ???governmentality??? in the natural laws of commerce and population that imposes itself as an impersonal and unalterable necessity, obliging individuals and governments to follow the virtuous path marked by them (Foucault 2004 a, 2004 b). This vision was in turn partially reversed by the critical attitudes that, both on the left and on the right wing of the political spectrum, arose in the last decades of the 19th century as a response to the so-called ???social question???, the dark side of the expansion generated by the industrial revolution and the development of world trade. And further evolutions occurred in the early 20th century as a response to the dramatic consequences of wars, revolutions and totalitarianisms. The communication of these messages was the product of individuals and networks who actively promoted not only the spread of economic ideas, but also the creation of institutions that, both in civil society and in government, translated these ideas into new programmes and actions, with a view to generating welfare, justice, and progress. And the point is that an important part of this process of social construction was represented not only by successful ideas and ideologies, but also by consistent languages and tropes shared by entire communities, through which social mechanisms and the behaviour of individuals and groups were represented. There is no social organisation without a coherent representation of it in the mind of participants, and there is no representation without a coherent language. It is in this way that historians of economics meet experts in linguistics and literature, and feel an increasing necessity to cooperate with them. A second, specific reason for this cooperation is determined by the typical transnational dimension of the spread of economic ideas and economic institutions. The maps traced by historical demographers for the expansion of the great viral diseases of the past across national borders are a model that could be applied to the circulation of economic notions and languages, and to the transmigration and adaptation of successful economic institutions to new contexts. Translations of treatises, textbooks, pamphlets and journal articles are essential elements of this virality (Guidi 2013). Historians of economics have started to pay attention to translations as vehicles for the circulation of economic ideas and tools for the promotion of ideologies, political programmes, and class or group interests (see Reinert 2011). The cooperation with experts of languages and literature dramatically improves the understanding of these phenomena, by encouraging a more in-depth contrastive analysis of the source and target texts, of their internal structures and paratextual apparatuses, and of terminology, syntax and rhetoric. If language is the backbone of the social construction of reality, the migration of terms, tropes and slang is the fuel of institutional imitation and adaptation. It is a fact that neologisms are often the product of translations, or of those individuals and circles that produced translations. But neologisms and new languages are successful and survive (at least for a certain time) only provided that they are actively spoken in relevant contexts. This is an additional reason for promoting and constantly feeding a common area of research between experts of economics and experts of languages. 3. Researchers on LSPs know but too well how indispensable is the cooperation among scholars of the areas they investigate. And those who deal with LSPs in a diachronic perspective know too that they need to cooperate with experts in the fields they study from a linguistic point of view. For this reason, as anticipated above, the EE-T project was a happy albeit rare opportunity for hybridising different types of knowledge, through collaboration among historians of economics, linguists, and specialists in inter-linguistic translation. Terminology specialists and linguists studying the economic discourse offer to the historians of economic sciences a more in-depth understanding of the phenomena they are interested in: we should never forget that texts are made up of words which have an origin, grow up and sometimes die. On the other hand, the intellectual, historical and ideological background of specialists in the history of economics allows LSP scholars to better contextualise the origin of a term and ??? understanding its reason ??? to discover meanings that were not prima facie evident. Languages speak about the world, they represent it and contribute to modify it. They give a name to notions that were unfamiliar to one culture, although they were well known by another culture. Languages are not fixed once and for all. They are submitted to continuous change: it is very often necessary to create neologisms to define new situations and concepts, and equally often these new words are ephemeral, just because they are connected to a circumscribed historical and social moment (Álvarez de Miranda 2009). Texts too, being composed of words, are dynamic objects: it is unavoidable to re-translate texts that were already translated in the past, in order to adapt them to the language in use. It is also indispensable to reformulate ancient texts, in order to continue to read them (Monti e Schnyder 2011). No text can be considered fixed, and this is true also for the economic texts on which the EE-T project was focused. These texts were carriers of ideas and concepts of which interlinguistic translation allowed not only the circulation, but also the evolution, since changes of languages always imply adaptation. The modern distinction between author and translator was unknown until the 19th century, and this phenomenon in a way makes it ???obligatory??? for scholars in specialistic translation and for scholars in the history of economists to cooperate. The discrepancy between original work and translator???s interventions must be carefully examined (Hermans 1985), and the study of terminological choices is relevant to understanding the role that a translation had in the development and circulation of economic ideas in a given society. It goes without saying that in some cases silence is the loudest voice, and the omission of a passage can be more significant than an interpolation. This book collects contributions by linguists, philologists and historians of economics. The main message it aims to convey is that no scholar is a monad, and that only by sharing specialistic knowledge we can enrich individual research and contribute to a more comprehensive didactics. 4. The papers collected in this book offer themselves as examples of the above described cross-disciplinary methodology. Matteo Lefèvre presents a study of the multilingual dictionary entitled Sex linguarum dilucidissimus dictionarius, published in Venice in 1541. The analysis focuses on the Italian and Spanish economic vocabularies, which are examined exploring their connection with the cultural and social context of the city and with the ideal of utilitas. Giulia Bianchi explores the Italian and French translations of David Hume???s Political Discourses along three centuries, in order to show the interesting pattern they reveal in the history of the interpretation of Hume???s works: in the eighteenth century Hume was considered a political writer, in the nineteenth century a historian and in the twentieth century a philosopher. Elena Carpi deals with the Italian translations of some writings of the Spanish economist Valentín de Foronda, published between 1788 and 1790. Carpi considers polyphony as a structural element of the translation process and of the ideological use of the text, of which she highlights the linguistic manipulation. Marco Cini studies the beginnings of the debate on the political economy in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany during the 1820s, that it was fuelled by the translation of numerous articles by British and French economists. The importation of the main controversies of the time on production and consumption is contextualised in the economic and intellectual background of 19th-century Tuscany, showing the evolution of the economic discourse from an enthusiastic adoption of laissez-faire ideas to a concern with the social and institutional dimension of economic development based on the philosophy of Giandomenico Romagnosi. Cristina Guccione examines the first and second series of the ???Biblioteca dell???Economista???, edited by Francesco Ferrara, as an early corpus of specialized translation. It considers the different text-types included in this series, and the influence of English on the early evolution of the Italian language of economics. An overview of the translation work shows how this important venture could be exploited for linguistic, translational and contrastive research. Marco Guidi and Monica Lupetti present a study on the Brazilian translation of Primi elementi di economia politica, published by Luigi Cossa in 1875. The innovative eclectic approach adopted by the authors is based on the assumption that the joint study of the circulation of economic ideas and of the linguistic tools for learning is indispensable for understanding the traductologic context of this work. Two contributions study the fortune of the translations of a curious small book by Otto Hübner, entitled Der kleine Volkswirth, published in German in 1852, and addressed to schoolchildren who, for the first time, approached the subject of political economy. This elementary textbook enjoyed an extraordinary fortune throughout the world, as it probably interpreted a point of view on economic relationships that was popular in the mid-nineteenth century . Carolina Flinz offers a stylistic analysis of the Italian translation (1854-1855), submitting it to a contrastive study. The paper focuses on the comparison between the mictrostructures of the source-text and of the target-text, in order to highlight the variation of register and of linguistic function. Alessandra Ghezzani explores the complex derivation of the Spanish translations of Der kleine Volkswirth published in Chile, Uruguay and Argentina in the 1860s and 1870s from various editions of the French translation; her contribution connects the spread of this synthetic textbook of political economy to the ideological context of the rise of Nation States in Hispanic America. Fabrizio Bientinesi examines the case of two different Italian translations of J.E. Cairnes??? Principles that were published in 1877 and 1878. The first translation, by Sidney Sonnino and Leopoldo Franchetti, was aimed at supporting their political agenda. The second translation was published in the series entitled ???Biblioteca dell???Economista???, edited by Gerolamo Boccardo, in a volume dedicated to methodological issues. The study demonstrates that there was no competition between these translations, which were done for different purposes. Pisa, June 2014 Elena Carpi, Marco E.L. Guidi References J. Astigarraga, J. Usoz (eds), L???économie politique et la sphère publique dans le débat des Lumières, Madrid, Rústica - Casa de Velázquez, 2013. P. Álvarez de Miranda, Neología y pérdida léxica, in E. de Miguel (ed.), Panorama de la lexicología, Barcelona, Ariel, 2009, pp. 133-158. M. Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population. Cours au Collège de France. 1977-1978, Paris, Gallimard-Seuil, 2004a. M. Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France. 1978-1979, Paris, Gallimard-Seuil, 2004b. M.E.L. Guidi, Attori traduttori e reti: la circolazione dell???economia politica in Europa e nel mondo attraverso le traduzioni (XIX-XX secolo), in M. Lupetti, V. Tocco (eds), Traduzione e autotraduzione: un percorso attraverso i generi letterari, Pisa, Ets 2013, pp. 197-216. S. Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come from, New York, Riverhead Books, 2010. Th. Hermans (ed.), The Manipulation of Literature. Studies in Literary Translation, London and Sydney, Croom Helms, 1985. E. Monti, P. Schnyder (eds), Autour de la retraduction: Perspectives littéraires européennes, Paris, Orizons, 2011. S. Reinert, Translating Empire. Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2011.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
