With every translation we read, at least three layers of time are activated: our moment of reading, the moment when he translation was made and the original invoked by the translation. More layers can easily be discerned, as shown by such things as indirect translations, retranslations and temporal references within translations.

Attention to the layers of time in translations reveals them as embedded in history. But translations are made for a reason, and these reasons exceed translation. That means we can also read translations as acting on their historical context. I will present a seven-step model to help us read translations as interventions and illustrate the model with an extended example.  

Theo Hermans is Emeritus Professor in the Centre for Translation Studies, University College London (UCL). His monographs include The Structure of Modernist Poetry (1982), Translation in Systems (1999; reissued in 2020 as a Routledge Translation Classic), The Conference of the Tongues (2007) and Translation and History (2022). He is the editor of The Manipulation of Literature (1985), The Flemish Movement: A Documentary History (1992), Crosscultural Transgressions (2002), Translating Others (2 vols, 2006), A Literary History of the Low Countries (2009) and other titles. His main research interests concern the theory and history of translation.