The Making of Transnational Textual Communities: German Women Translators, 1800-1850

By portraying the work of female translators from the first half of the nineteenth century, this essay explores how women created new textual communities that capitalized on the increasing diffusion of print networks. In doing so, women used translation to negotiate new relationships to print and publishing that facilitated their emergence as a professional writing class. Translations by women also promoted the creation of new, increasingly international cultural geographies in which translation functioned not as a force for homogenization, but as a means of identifying cultural differences. (AP)