in Ireland, after gaining independence, the country was very much seeking their own history detached from the “British history” and thus supported national historiography.
The aim of this paper is to turn this thought around and move away from national borders in order to look at languages and the connection between these languages through translation instead. It does not suffice to remain within today’s or past national borders in order to grasp the complexity of languages and, in that geographical area, of translation which took place on a daily basis due to the richness of languages in the British Isles. This is an important step in moving away from national categories in both Translation Studies and historiography towards a broader understanding of translation processes.
In the British Isles, translation was closely connected to the changes in the use of language; over the course of the nineteenth century English became the dominant language in the British Isles due to the colonial endeavours of the English Empire, mainly aimed at enforcing “Englishness” in all regions of the British Isles, in terms of language, religion, and many other facets of daily life. As a result of post-colonial movements by the colonies in the sense of resistance against the colonial rule of the Empire, different movements formed in the Celtic regions of the British Isles to revive the Celtic languages and culture(s) at the end of the nineteenth century, which were later summarized under the term Celtic Revival. These efforts comprised translations of different texts and led to different translation cultures across the Isles.
The concept of translation culture is understood as defined by the Translation Studies scholar Erich Prunč as the “gesellschaftliche Konsens und Dissens über unzulässige, zulässige, empfohlene und obligatorische Formen der Translation”2 (Prunč 2008: 25) at a certain time and within a certain space. It reflects the prevailing power relations and values of a given society and shapes the values and characteristics of a given receiving culture (Prunč 2000: 65). However, the term culture within the concept of translation culture has been the subject of discussion due to the tendency to associate culture with nation (Pym 2006: 23; Wolf 2010: 23). Prunč himself relativised his concept of culture and pointed out that there can be several translation cultures within one single culture or language area (Prunč 2008: 25). In this paper, which investigates such a geographical area, this concept will serve as an object of research which, according to Prunč, can be the subject of a descriptive analysis (Prunč 2005: 176). Understanding translation culture as an object of research rather than a theoretical concept allows the identification of parallel developments between different translation cultures, which will add a new field of application to this concept.
In order to analyse the translation culture(s) in the British Isles during the Celtic Revival, to show how potentially separate translation cultures were interwoven, and to define the actual role of translation for the Celtic Revival, this paper will discuss several aspects which constitute a translation culture using secondary sources. This will be done by examining which texts were translated as well as the different translation strategies employed for translating primarily literary texts and the actors involved. This paper will also try to identify parallel developments in the translation traditions of languages across the British Isles to see whether there was a Celtic translation culture during the Celtic Revival rather than individual national translation cultures. Furthermore, by investigating different Celtic translation cultures, this article claims that language policy as practised by the people rather than prescribed by the government, and the translation policy related to this are an integral part of a so-called translation culture of Celtic languages.
An overview will be given of the history of the British Isles surrounding the period under investigation before describing the role of translation for the language reviving efforts during the Celtic Revival, as language and translation policy can never be investigated without considering the socio-political circumstances at the time.
2 Historical Overview: Celtic Revival
2.1 Celtic languages policies in the early and mid-nineteenth century
In the early 1800s, Insular Celtic languages were spoken in large parts of the British Isles and north-western France. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1801–1922) was governed from a common seat of government in Westminster. The early nineteenth century was “a period of economic upheaval, in which Britain shifted from being a predominantly agricultural and commercial society to being the world’s first industrial nation” (Hilton 1985: 249). While English was the language spoken throughout the majority of England, and French in France, the languages of Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic and Manx (the Goidelic languages), and Welsh, Cornish and Breton (the Brythonic languages) were still present. However, these languages had started to experience decline to varying degrees, with Cornish having not been used as a means of communication since before 1800. The decline in these languages was strongly influenced by the mid-nineteenth century “onset of literacy in English” (Kearney 2014: 17), and it continued throughout the remainder of the century, as described by Henry Jenner:
Most Cornishmen habitually speak English, and few, very few, could hold five minutes’ conversation in the old Celtic speech. Yet the memory of it lingers on, and no one can talk about the country itself, and mention the places in it, without using a wealth of true Cornish words. But a similar thing may be said of a very large proportion of Welshmen, Highlanders, Irishmen, Manxmen, and Bretons. (Jenner 1904/2016)
The following sections provide more detail on this decline of the Insular Celtic languages in the period before the Celtic Revival.
2.1.1 Irish
In Ireland, Irish Gaelic, or Irish, was a majority language in 1800. It was spoken throughout Ireland by the Irish but was less common in north-eastern and eastern parts of the country, where English and/or Scots were spoken by settlers. Throughout the nineteenth century, various factors contributed to its decline, making it a minority language by 1900. The language of education and the legal system, for example, was English, and Irish was not part of the school curriculum until 1878 (Ó Buachalla 1984). The Great Famine (1845–1852) and the laissez faire approach of Westminster during the famine led to at least one million deaths and many more emigrating (Kinealy 1997). The worst affected areas were in rural Ireland, where Irish was still widely spoken, which heavily impacted the number of speakers of Irish. A further result of the Great Famine was widespread discontent with Westminster and a somewhat intensified feeling of nationalism. In the years following the famine, a number of important nationalist movements were founded, such as the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1858 (see Lee 2014) and the Home Rule League in 1873. Language decline continued over the following decades, with the percentage of the population who could speak Irish falling from 23.3 % in 1851 to 18.2 % in 1881 (Akenson 2012: 378–379).
2.1.2 Scottish Gaelic
Until the eighteenth century Scottish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic or simply Gaelic, was widely spoken in the Scottish Highlands and the Hebrides, while Scots was more commonly spoken in the Lowlands of Scotland, the northernmost tip of the Highlands, the Orkney Islands and parts of the northeast of Ireland. For 290,000 Scots (23 %), Scottish Gaelic was their first and only tongue (MacAulay 2008: 141), but in the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745/46, many elements of Highland culture were banned, and the use of the Gaelic language was discouraged. From the middle of the eighteenth century to approximately 1860, Scottish Highlanders were evicted from their lands in the Highland Clearances (Richards 2008) to make way for sheep, for example, which offered a more profitable way of using the land. Apart from emigration from the Highlands caused by government policy, social and economic change during the period led to many Highlanders emigrating and/or becoming more reliant on English (Devine 2002). Parts of Scotland, primarily the area around Glasgow, became more industrialised and started to experience
