Call for papers for a conference in Paris, 24-25 May 2013, held as part of the ANR “Schusocru” research project: “The constitution of human and social sciences in Russia: networks and circulation of models of knowledge from the 18th century to the 1920s”

From the 18th century, the constitution of scientific fields in Russia, particularly in what are known as the human sciences, followed many paths but it was largely based on transfers, borrowings, and implantations from Western Europe in the creation of institutions, the education of specialists, and the circulation of books. Against that background, the invention of scientific language in the various disciplines is of particular interest and merits historical research. This topic immediately raises another question, namely which national language was used to transmit knowledge. Use of the languages in which the knowledge was originally written (Latin, French, German, etc.), known not only by practitioners from the scholarly centres of Europe, but also by the first Russian specialists, was soon paralleled by the end of the 18th century by translations into Russian of Western scholarly publications.  These included those published in Russia in their original languages, as at the Academy of Sciences.  Later, in some rare, but significant cases, Russian works were translated in Western languages. As a result, translation became a process of cultural exchange and of construction of science; it led to an intense labour of linguistic adaptation and invention, first of lexical terms and then of syntax, of a scope and scale that need to be measured: the language of science, an object of invention, immediately became an object for communication, education and public instruction.