Appunti Medieval Germanic Studies

2 Medieval Germanic Studies

Translation: starting from etymology.

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“Tradurre” “Translate” (“Traduzione” and “Translation”)

Translate - Tradurre

These words derive from Latin.

- They are formed from “trans” (tra, abbreviation), a prefix meaning “to change from one point to

another” (a sort of passage, a movement from one field to another), and “across” (transversal,

moving across different fields). Here we use the meaning of “over”.

- “Durre”: “ducĕre” (accento sulla prima sillaba) (condurre da una parte all’altra).

- “Late”: XIV century, “trans-latare”.

Lat. fero-fers (I-II pers.) / tuli / latum (part. pass) / ferre (inf.)

o From “latum” we have “trans-latare”.

o “Traslato”: past participle of “transferre”: metaphor (you take one meaning of the word

o and you transfer it to another semantic field).

- Ducere-ferre: both mean to transport something from, for example, one language to another.

When something belongs to one culture and then is transferred to another culture, there is always some

sort of changes. You cannot expect to have the same things. This is sometimes an advantage because there

are some improvements, but sometimes it may be a disadvantage.

- We are not translating from one language to another, but from one culture to another.

Languages are connected to their own culture:

- connected to habits, even if the words are the same (ex. pasta, coffee) there are differences in the

object itself.

- connected to different practices (“be like bread and butter”: being a perfect match, because

Americans eat bread and butter for every breakfast and go perfectly together).

- culture associate concepts to words (language is never mutual): colours, red, for Sweden red is a

brownish color, they have separated the spectrum of colors in a different way. We can associated

red with blood or love, in our culture the typical color for weddings is white, while the typical

color of weddings in China is red (white is the color for funerals).

Rosso d’uovo – yolk (yellow)

o

- The Bible is a text that has a particular origin.

The Bible is divided in two parts: Old Testament (to Hebrews and Christians) and New

o Testament (Christians).

 Old Testament: written in Hebrew (language of religion, language of the culture

people) and Aramaic (one semitic language).

 New Testament: written in Greek.

This is connected to the culture.

There is one animal in the Bible that is very important, that is, lamb (agnello). It is important

because it is a sacrifice (Abraham and his son used to sacrifice lambs) and because Christ is

defined as “Agnello di Dio”. For Easter we have eaten lamb because it is a symbol of Christ’s

sacrifice.

A Protestant priest (a scholar), Eugene Nida, in the middle of the XX century introduced the

“Principle of Equivalence”. Since he was a priest, he was interested in the translation of the Bible

into different cultures. They used to kill a lamb for sacrifices, and they made the comparison

between lamb and Christ, but if he had to translate this story to people in Africa or people in

Greenland (seals, ice), that do not have lamb, they do not connect the importance of the animal

since it does not exist in that culture. So, for the principle of equivalence, he compared lamb to

seal to refer to Christ.

Your whole life depends on that animal.

o

This concept is a concept of translation theory because sometimes we have the same concept, the

same word (but the object can vary), and sometimes there are some concepts that are so connected

2 to a culture that it becomes difficult to transfer this concept to a different culture (while having the

same message).

The strategies of translation

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70s of XX century The start of translation studies (the name of the translator was rarely presented).

- Lawrence Venuti (Italian origins, but lived in America, and was taught nothing about his original

culture) wrote in the 90s one of his most important books, “The Translator’s Invisibility”.

One of the requirements of the publishing houses was to translate by making it not seem

o like a translation. The translator had to be like glass, there should have not been any

differences. The translator had to translate in the same way as the author would have

written in the language.

 You can’t do that. You can’t be the same person as the author, there is always the

filter of the translator.

Venuti: he attacks the principle of Nida because a translator should not be invisible, the

o reader must realize that the text belongs to a different culture (also being put in front of

words that are foreign to his own culture). Differences should not be eliminated.

Venuti says that the reader must be able to recognize that the text belongs to a different

o culture.

Strategies:

Source-oriented:

- Foreignizing (Venuti)

- Literal translation (traduzione alla lettera)

- Word by word translation

- Faithful translation

Target-oriented:

- Addomesticating (house, so, familiar) (towards the target audience)

- Free translation

Those are expressions that we have always had in translation, we have different strategies.

We can go back to the Romans that translated texts from Greek culture. The Greeks were advanced in

literature and culture, so Romans wanted to learn from them. Translators produced translations for

educated people not to understand word by word, but to imitate and create elegant texts in Latin. The

purpose was not to understand the meaning of the text but to enrich the Latin culture with Greek

imitations. They wanted to learn how to write like the Greeks.

- Free translations with the purpose to acquire the style (to use metaphors, and complicated syntactic

text).

The problem with the Bible: it was not meant for only educated people, but it had to inform people from

different countries of the message of the Bible. There are different requirements: the translator must speak

with everybody, also people that are not cultured. There is a problem, that is, the fact that the Bible was

written by God himself that dictated the books to those who physically wrote them. Can you transform the

word of God? No, because you must be faithful to the source, but it should be understandable by

everybody. New strategies come up and you must introduce new forms of translation.

- Old Saxon stories: change the elements.

We mentioned how two elements of translation during the Roman period: the Romans translated from Greek because

they wanted to introduce new rhetoric figures and topics, imitating the Greeks. The audience also influences the style

that we use, indeed the audience was formed of educated people that already could read texts in Greek (they did not

want to underline the meaning, but they wanted to teach the style).

1. Purpose

2. Audience

2 Strategies: 

- Free translation (used by the Romans) Target-oriented

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- Literal translation Source oriented: the attention is on the source, that is, the original text.

These are just two extreme poles, but it is clear that in practice there is a “continuum” (a Latin word that

gives the idea of graduation (the presence also of something in between a free translation and a literal

translation). 

- “It is raining cats and dogs” translation continuum

Sta piovendo cani e gatti Piovono cani e gatti Piove a catinelle Piove a dirotto Ne succedono di

tutte

(Literal translation) (Word-by-word translation) (Target-oriented, but metaphorical) (T-Oriented) (Free

translation)

- There are jokes that are changed to make them function depending on the audience (and on the

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language) Principle of Equivalence of Nida (not a lexical equivalence, but a dynamic

equivalence, because it must function in the target culture).

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C’è un frisone che… C’è un carabiniere che…

o

- We approached the spread of the Bible, Christianity, and the need to make people know the

contents of the Bible. The Bible has two parts: the Old Testament and New Testament.

The Old Testament was mainly written in Hebrew and Aramaic, and the New Testament

o was mainly written in Greek.

Main three sacred languages used for religion: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew (until the first

o half of the XX century).

 These three languages were written together on a piece of wood, a very important

story of salvation: the Resurrection of Christ. When Christ was crucified, there

was a piece of wood on the cross that spelled “INRI” Iesus Nazarenus Rex

Iudaeorum, which was written in those three languages. For this, theologians

believed that God wanted believers to use those three languages.

 Tower of Babel (New Testament)

The episode according to the Bible in which nobody could understand each other

is the episode related to the tower of Babel. People in Babel wanted to build a

tower that had to be so high as to reach heaven. God interpreted it was an episode

of sin and decided to punish them by making those people not to understand each

other anymore.

 Pentecost

Some fathers of the church tried to look for an important piece of the Bible that

solves the problem, and they found the solution for the problem of languages in

the New Testament. This episode happened in Pentecost, that is, fifty days after

Christ’s resurrection, Christ appeared to the apostles, and told them to spread his

word to the whole world through to the Holy Ghost presented as a flame on the

head, thanks to which they could speak all languages.

 Venerable Bede

He said that the episode of Babel was a punishment, for which for a lot of time we

were not able to speak with each other. The Pentecost is important because this is

God’s way to tell us that we can speak about God and his word in all languages.

The Bible was meant for people that could not read the Bible in its original language, but there was a

problem with the translation. The problem is that the Bible was directly dictated by God: you cannot

change the word of God, but you must produce a translation for the target people.

- St. Girolamo (died in 420)

The Old Testament was already (70 people translation, the legend says that seventy translators

translated the Bible from Aramaic into Greek individually, and when they compared their

translations, they were all exactly equal). Girolamo translated into Latin, and the name of this

translation is “Vulgata”.

2 He was accused by St. Agostino of not having translated the Bible properly, so Girolamo had to

defend himself and explain how he translated the Bible.

The Bible is dictated by God, and for this reason, even the order of the words contains a

o mystery, so you have to translate very literally in order not to destroy this mystery. But

sometimes you are forced to introduce some words (even the authors of the four gospels

sometimes introduce words while reporting Christ’s statements).

 He gives an example: they tell the story of a miracle of Christ saying to a girl to

stand up and walk. He is a translator that produces a very literal translation of

religious words, but he underlines how sometimes this is not possible.

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“And Jesus told her to do this…” addition to the words that Christ said

(explanation, there is an addition to introducing his word).

- Translation from Greek or Latin into our Germanic languages: is it easy for a monk coming from a

village in Britain and learn Latin? It isn’t. For Germanic people, Latin was a foreign language and

had to be learned and studied. In those populations of the Western part (Ostrogoths and Visigoths),

there is an important person in the Visigoths that is Ulfilas (he lived in the IV century, he was a

bishop, member of the Church, his father was a Goth, but his mother was a Greek, and indeed he

could speak Greek). Ulfilas is important because he translated the Bible from Greek into Gothic. It

was revolutionary. The language is Gothic, he did not want to use runes because runes were used

for magic and pagan situation (runes were not appropriate to write down the word of God).

He did not use Greek or the Latin alphabet, but he decided to invent an alphabet. Ulfilas

introduced the revolutionary idea to translate the Bible into his own language and creating an

alphabet for his own language.

We have a few manuscripts:

o  Codex Argenteus

 Some letters are white, others are written in gold, and the Pergamene was of a

reddish color. These manuscripts were copied in Italy during the reign of the

Ostrogoths (535-553, Greek-Gothic war) and started in 553 with king Theodoric.

People could not read those manuscripts; they were only for the king.

 Those manuscripts reached the Western part and the idea of translating the Bible

into Germanic languages was introduced. Translating the Bible from Greek into

Gothic language, which was not part of the three sacred languages, there is the

idea to translate when moving into Western.

 Idea to translate the Bible into one that was not one of the three sacred languages.

Monks had to learn Latin and pray in this language. This is difficult.

Lindisfarne Gospels

In Lindisfarne, a very beautiful book was copied and decorated in Latin, and the monks had to learn the

Bible in Latin, and they had to translate it. The translation here has a purpose, that is, understanding.

Translation was a way to understand a language that was not understandable.

- It is a complete interlinear gloss (interlinear gloss: word-by-word translation in-between lines;

glossaries: collecting words out of their original context)

The manuscript itself with Latin dates to the beginning of the VIII century, but somebody studying it

decided that they wanted to understand Latin better, and the glosses date to the late X century.

In the interlinear glosses, there is information about words, but not about syntax (word-by-word

translations are meant to understand the text). The purpose is to study, and the audience is made up of

scholars and students.

Regola di Benedetto

- Cod. Sangallensis 916

- Benedetto lived in Italy (Montecassino) in the VI century, and he wrote his Rule, which is

composed of all the rules regarding life in the monastery, and the monks had to learn it by heart. It

is impossible and difficult to learn by heart something that you don’t understand.

- Interlinear translation into German of the Benedictine’s Rule.

2 Matteo di Mondsee

- Cod. Vindobonensis 3093

- Date: end of the VIII century (second example after Ulfilas as a witness of the translation of the

Bible into a Germanic language).

- Translated into German dialects at the end of the VIII century. Here there isn’t an interlinear

version, but on the left, there is the Latin translation and, on the right, the German translation. This

has a different audience and purpose. Probably this translation was meant for preaches so they

have material in their own language to explain the word of Matthew’s Gospel.

- It is more in a direction of a target-oriented translation, but it is in the middle of the continuum (in

between a literal and a free translation). There are examples in which the translator introduces

different names, basically changing the original Bible text.

- This manuscript was not considered as important, and was subsequentially cut into pieces, that

were put together by modern researchers but some parts are still unreadable.

Taziano

- Codex Sangallensis 56

- Date: 830-840

- Another way of translating: the Latin text is on the left while on the right there is the German

translation.

Tatian was a Christian writer from Syria that lived in the first century after Christ (I

o century a.C.) and he wrote an evangelic harmony. There are four accepted Gospels, but

there are also more, and they have episodes that sometimes overlap and others that differ.

He tried to create one single narrative of the Gospels with no repetitions and no

contradictions.

- The translation is in between an interlinear translation (Regola di Benedetto, Lindisfarne Gospels)

and Matthew’s Gospel. It is interlinear but there are also changes, like the position of the adjective

before the word instead of the word before the adjective (following Germanic grammar rules), put

practically it is very similar to an interlinear kind of translation.

- The audience of this are students learning the Bible.

Continuum

Literal translation Free

translation

Regola di Benedetto Taziano Matthew’s Gospel

Lindisfarne Gospels

1. Purpose of the translation

2. Audience

a. Different points of view

i. Massacro di Tian anmen – Rebellion of Tian anmen (for the Chinese)

ii. Invasioni barbariche – Volksverwanderungen

3. (Problem of the) Genre/Typology

a. Important because there are elements typical of a text, so when you translate, you have to

keep problems related to the genre in mind.

i. Bible: the problem is that the Bible is God’s Word, which cannot be changed.

ii. Joke: you want people to laugh, so you cannot reproduce a joke that does not

function in the target culture.

iii. The same text can be translated in different ways according to the genre.

Pater Noster di Gallo

Sankt Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek 911

- Scriptorium: area sud-occidentale

2 - Dialetto alemanno

- Fine 700

- Senza testo latino

- Senza commento

There are different translations.

- Pater Noster: “Lord’s Prayer”, said by Jesus Christ himself “Oratio dominica” (Oratio of God).

There are two different forms of the same prayer in two Gospels. We have it in Matthew’s Gospel

and Luke’s Gospel. This is normal: when the authors of the Gospels wrote down God’s Word, they

wrote it down by memory and written it differently.

Translators had to decide which one of the two texts to translate.

The Bible is the Word of God, and here there’s Christ who is speaking.

Translated from Hebrew to Latin, and then to Germanic dialects (like alemanno, spoken in the

south and in Switzerland).

- The translation is not difficult in its handwriting, there are holes in the paper that however do not

block the words (do not interfere with the writing).

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- Fater (Germanic) Vater