Travel accounts as objects of reflection on historiography and translating practice

Abstract

Travel accounts make up a specific discursive field that requires reflections on the practice of translating which are indissolubly linked with reflections on historiography as a discursive practice. This fact points out the necessity of the examining of those accounts not exclusively as a text-limited issue. According to new paradigms brought up in the field of the so called Critical Discourse Analysis, the accounts could be regarded simultaneously as representational, actional and ideational (i.e. identity forming) practice. Based upon that and some of its consequences, the article suggests that translating travel accounts should not be carried out only for the purpose of hermeneutic ‘immediacy’, but also guided by the interpretation of the past in historiographical terms.