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Translation has always been an integral part of the history of the British Isles and Lower Brittany, a geographic region that has experienced many invasions and periods of colonization over the course of history. The emerging variety of languages spoken in the British Isles made translation a necessary tool for communication and for enforcing political agendas. England as a colonial power used language and thus translation as a means of suppressing their colonies all over the world, including their neighbours in the British Isles. For this paper, Ireland, Scotland and Wales are seen as the first colonies of what later came to be known as the (British/English) Empire.1 The colonies, on the other hand, utilised translation to free themselves from colonial rule and reclaim their own independent identity, to some extent by translating English texts into the respective Celtic tongues but also by transferring their own cultural heritage from Celtic languages into English, which enabled more people from these regions who were not proficient in the Celtic languages to grasp the cultural background of their nation. Especially during the Celtic Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there was an increasing eagerness to revive Celtic languages, which was largely only possible through translation. Once dominant languages had almost become extinct by then partly as a result of English being used as a means of colonial oppression in the form of linguistic purity. In Ireland, for example, in addition to the Plantations and the Great Famine, which had drastically reduced the Gaelic-speaking population, the use of Gaelic was forbidden under the Penal Laws. For this reason, Irish children were forced to speak English in order to get access to education (Hickey 2008; Ó Cuív 1966). English became associated with social advancement in many of the regions, for example in Wales, where the Blue Books Report led to the Welsh language being formally removed from the school system. May sees this as “merely a reflection of the wider, long-established hierarchising of English over Welsh, along with the accompanying belief that in the English language lay the route to social and economic mobility” (May 2000: 104). Reviving Celtic culture through translation was a way of overcoming the cultural rule of the British Empire and tracing back one’s own identity for many people in the Celtic regions.

The role of language and especially of translation for the British Isles has not yet been researched thoroughly within Translation Studies and beyond. Scholars have only examined certain aspects of translation of languages spoken in the British Isles and the role it played in certain historical periods, e.g. the history of translation into Scots (Corbett 1999) or the history of translation in Wales (Miguélez-Carballeira et al. 2016a). Several publications have also looked at the mutual influence of language policy and translation policy in order to learn more about recent official endeavours to promote the Celtic languages (see e.g. Kaufmann 2012; González Núñez 2016). Ireland, in this respect, is a special case as the role of translation between Irish Gaelic and English throughout the different periods of Irish history has been researched exhaustively (see e.g. Cronin 1996; Tymoczko 1999; Tymoczko/Ireland 2003). However, this kind of research in Translation Studies but also beyond has almost only used national or imperial borders to narrow its field of research. In encyclopaedic articles, the translation tradition of all languages and cultures in the British Isles has often been subsumed under British translation tradition (see e.g. Ellis/Oakley-Brown 2009; Kittel et al. 2011). Referring to a British translation space does not only ignore the vast diversity of languages in the British Isles (e.g. Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Manx, Welsh, Breton, Cornish, English) but using the term British for all languages and cultures involved supports the (post-)colonial domination of the English colonial power. Moreover, the languages of the British Isles inevitably influenced each other, leaving us with a map of blurred language zones, even within what we know as a country or nation.

Although it is still rather common in historiography to investigate the history of the British Empire as a whole (e.g. Cannon/Crowcroft 2015; Vernon 2017), while focussing mostly on the history of England, there have been attempts to move away from the largely England-centred approach towards a more complex understanding of the history of that geographic region. The Four-Nations-Approach looks at England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales as separate nations with their own independent history and allows for a polycentric perception of the history of the British Isles (e.g. Lloyd-Jones/Scull 2018; MacKenzie 2008). Despite this effort to create a more differentiated image of the British Isles, this approach still concentrates on national borders. This might be due to the strong connections between borders and nationalist movements in a number of the regions. Especially 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.