The following round table, like Korchilov, aims to alert us to the dangers inherent in translating. Straightforward manipulation for an easily recognizable purpose is not the real problem. Historians as readers and authors of translations encounter a severer challenge, the limits of translatability. Those limits comprise not just language barriers that can be jumped by sufficiently trained experts, but cultural predispositions that operate like a filter. If the original meaning is to percolate through the filter, patient professionals must mediate and interpret in a comprehensive way between two cultures.
Every historian encounters the language and culture filter.
This is especially true for students of American history outside the United States, whether they publish and teach in a language other than English or use English in a culturally distinct environment where it is not the prevailing mother tongue, such as India or Norway. But in preparing this round table we discovered to our surprise that historians have not gone on record to share their experiences and their attempts to come to terms with their own role as translators and cross-cultural mediators. Even American scholars who think about the impact of American political institutions and ideas abroad have ignored the language and culture filter. A prominent example is the political scientist Carl J. Friedrich, who left Germany in the 1920s for Harvard University. His lectures on the impact of American constitutionalism abroad carefully surveyed French, Spanish, German, and other perceptions of the American system of government throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries without ever discussing the potentially distorting effects of translation.