History: Lost in Translation
What if history hasn’t always meant what we think it means? Professor Rupert Heath returns to original texts to investigate how translation has shaped our understanding of the past, uncovering ambiguities, altered meanings and overlooked details that could cast familiar historical stories in an entirely new light.
Much of what we know about history has reached us through words. Chronicles, letters, inscriptions, religious writings and official records have provided the foundations upon which generations of historians have reconstructed the past.
But those words have often travelled through different languages, cultures and centuries before reaching us.
In History: Lost in Translation, Professor Rupert Heath investigates what can happen along the way.
Returning to original sources and working alongside linguists, historians and specialists in ancient languages, Rupert examines familiar historical accounts from a different perspective. Rather than simply asking whether a source is reliable, he asks a more fundamental question: do the words mean what later generations have assumed they mean?
Translation is rarely a matter of substituting one word for another. Languages contain concepts, idioms, double meanings and cultural references that may have no precise equivalent elsewhere. A translator must make choices — and over centuries those choices can become accepted as historical fact.
The series takes significant texts and traces how their meanings have evolved. By comparing manuscripts, examining the context in which words were originally written and exploring alternative interpretations, apparently minor linguistic details can open surprisingly large historical questions.
Rupert also investigates the people behind the translations. Who produced the versions that became authoritative? What knowledge did they possess? What assumptions did they bring to their work? And how did the political, religious or cultural world of the translator influence the language they chose?
This is not about rewriting history for the sake of controversy. It is an investigation into how history itself is transmitted.
Fresh, forensic and intellectually adventurous, History: Lost in Translation reveals the fragile journey between an event happening, someone recording it, and us believing we understand what they said.
