Cartography as translation: The map production of eighteenth-century French 'armchair geographers'

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The influential French geographers Guillaume Delisle (1675-1726), Philippe Buache (1700-1773) and Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville (1697-1782) referred to themselves as 'géographes de cabinet'. What they had in common was their method of composing maps on the basis of extensive collections of written sources instead of visiting the countries in question and surveying them in person. The work of these geographers consisted, first of all, in collecting information and documents of various kinds, including maps, travelogues, historiographic works, letters, tables, and oral testimonies of travellers who they were in personal contact with. The next step was to critically evaluate the collected sources by comparing them, using them as correctives against each other, and ultimately conflating them. This approach involved processes of translation on many levels. Firstly, foreign-language texts, names and expressions, for instance Latin or Spanish ones, had to be translated into French. Secondly, data from different historical periods had to be conciliated, and older accounts had to be translated in accordance with more recent knowledge. Thirdly, intersemiotic translations were necessary, since the evaluated geographic material originated in different media, and had to be translated into a mutual “cartographic language”. Fourthly, it was necessary to adapt knowledge which originated in specific local contexts, for example missionary contexts, for the interests and requirements of French geographers and/or their employers. The translation of indigenous knowledge, especially, often proved a challenge for these geographers. This project will explore processes of translation in eighteenth-century French map production. For this purpose, a broad range of archival material in Paris, including the collections of sources, correspondence, and mémoires of the above-mentioned “armchair geographers” Delisle, Buache und d’Anville will be analysed. The main aim is to utilise the focus on processes of translation to illustrate the complexity of the cultural techniques employed in map production, since this complexity is often relegated to a background position due to the usual one-sided focus on mathematical and technical factors. In this sense, cartography is not to be understood as a field which was separate from other forms of knowledge production, but as an integral component of early modern cultures of translation.