Political Corrections: The Revolutionary Context and English Retranslations of Johann Georg Zimmermann’s Vom Nationalstolze [On National Pride] (1768)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article concerns the English translations of a popular eighteenth-century work on national pride. Originally entitledVon dem Nationalstolze[On National Pride], it was first published in 1758 and then twice revised by the author, Johann Georg Zimmermann (1728-1795). A physician by profession, the Swiss-born Zimmermann treated patriotism as a collective sentiment and soon attracted interest across Europe. Accordingly, the second revised editionVom Nationalstolze(1768) also appeared in a number of translations, including in English asAn Essay on National Pridefor the first time in 1771. Since an English retranslation by Samuel Hull Wilcocke was published in 1797 and yet another anonymous retranslation in 1805, the article examines these as attempts to correct the first English translation and to demonstrate the perceived relevance of the source text in the context of the French Revolutionary Wars. Starting from the premise that Zimmermann himself wrote about national pride in order to correct the false preconceptions of his readers, I argue that each translation also participated in the negotiation of a “healthy” form of patriotism. In so doing, the retranslation by Wilcocke in particular took considerable liberties in relation to the source text, while the second retranslator appears to have aspired to produce the most precise and transparent rendition of Zimmermann’s original words. However, as revealed by an examination of the linguistic transformations which the work underwent in Britain, all of the English translations adjusted its political meaning in ways that were significant to contemporary readers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".