Introduction

What constitutes a translation is always subject tonorms within a given language community. As TheoHermans observes, the term translation ‘appeals to arecognizable and circumscribed category, both aknown concept and a socially acknowledged practice’.Ever since Roman Jakobson's seminal division oftranslation into ‘intralingual’ (rewording),‘interlingual’ (translation proper), and‘intersemiotic’ (transmutation) approaches, scholarshave sought to define translation through bothprescriptive and descriptive methods. While thelion's share of such scholarly efforts has beendevoted to interlingual translation inEuropean-language contexts, some scholars havesought to place practices of translation on acontinuum of practices of ‘rewriting’ across allthree of Jakobson's categories. Most famously,perhaps, André Lefevere argued that what he termed‘rewriters’ – a terms designed to capture thebreadth of translational activities – constitutedthe ‘motor force behind literary evolution’, subjectto ideology and poetic aesthetics.

In a recent surge of interest in intralingualtranslation, scholars have paid more attention tohow practices of translational rewriting shaped thetransition to modern written standards withinmodernizing empires and nation-states. Suchinvestigations show that the emergence of modernwritten forms of language was not only mediatedthrough interlingual forms of rewriting but alsodepended heavily on intralingual approaches. Suchrewriting involved the translation of ‘classicaltexts’ into modernized written ‘vernaculars’ whileaccommodating new ways to bridge ‘speech’ in itsgeographically distinct formations within the newlyevolving written standards.