Inglese III - Appunti

Translation in Roman Times and with Martin Luther

In the Roman times, the word for word translation was exactly what it said, replacing each individual word of the source text (Greek) with its equivalent in Latin. However, St. Jerome, one of the most important translators, criticized this approach as it obscured the sense of the original. Instead, he advocated for sense for sense translation, which focused on translating the sense or content of the source language.

A similar approach to translation was seen in the Arab world, particularly in Baghdad, where a great center of translation was established. Translations from Arabic to Greek preferred the sense for sense translation method.

Martin Luther played a significant role in translation during his time. In the Church, there was a concern for accurately conveying the correct sense of the words in the Bible or Testaments (new and old). Both St. Jerome and Martin Luther were translators who took on these challenging assignments.

Martin Luther faced criticism from the Church for his additions to the word.

“allein” (alone/only) because there was no equivalent Latin word. Luther follows St Jerome to reject the word for word translation strategy. In this type of text (religion) we have the problem of the paramount of the concept. Flora Amos notes that early translators often differed considerably in the meaning they gave, such as “faithfulness”, “accuracy” and even the word “translation” itself. She introduced the concept of “truth” and “spirit” in the area of translation. Dryden reduces all translation into 3 categories: 1) Metaphrase (word by word), 2) Paraphrase (the word has not strictly followed by the sense), 3) Imitation (forsaking to word and sense). Schleimermacher identifies 2 different types of text: 1) Commercial text, 2) Scholarly and artistic text.

Chapter 3

Equivalence and equivalent effect

After the period of “fight” between free Vs literal, we can talk about the meaning of a particular issue, like for example...

“Equivalence”Roman Jakobson was maybe the first to talk about equivalence in his opera “The nature of linguistic meaning and equivalence”. We could say that translation is a game to equivalence, because a word in the source language correspond to a word (with the same sense) in the target language. But translation is more complicated.

Jakobson follows the idea (Seassure) that the signifier and the signified, together, form the linguistic sign, but the sign is arbitrary.

For the message to be “equivalent” in source and target language, the code units will be different since they belong to two different sign systems (languages) which partition reality differently.

Ex. house : Is feminine in Romances languages and neuter in German.

Only in poetry Jakobson talk about “untranslatable” and requires a creative transposition.