From St Jerome to Hypertext

Translation in Theory and Practice

Per Qvale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317640530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

From St. Jerome to Hypertext is an ambitious attempt to chart the terrain of literary translation - its history, theory and practice. It examines translation from linguistic, extralinguistic and philosophical perspectives and poses a range of important questions, including: the extent to which a linguistically creative original text should be reduced to fit existing norms in translation; whether translators should render the author's voice or the author's vision; how a translator might bridge the gender gap, generation gap, cultural gap, geographical distance, and distance in time; the way in which one translates texts which are themselves multilingual; whether the Bible is a technical book, a primary source, a drama or a revelation; the impact that processes of internationalization, multimedia communication and technological innovations might have on literature in translation.

Individual chapters offer detailed treatmemnt of topis such as the relationship between author and translator, wordplay and language games, syntax, cultural biotes, understanding and meaning, and the process of translation.

1. The Science of Translation and Translation Studies

This chapter begins with a journey through history, pausing at the early Bible translators, before sweeping along the main lines of traditional translation theory, continuing to the linguistic orientation of more recent translation theory, and lingering at the latest approach represented by Translation Studies or Translation Research, names that cover broadly-oriented, culture-related translation studies as well as more specialised research, which have gained considerable ground since the 1980s. In this context, Translation Studies will be examined in the light of scientific theory. Finally, there will be a brief discussion of translation activities in Norway before and after the union with Denmark.

A. Translation theory in a historical light

Wir wissen eigentlich noch gar nicht, was eine Übersetzung sey.

FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL

St Jerome’s cradle stood somewhere in or near the country now called Croatia. It has never been easy to say where boundaries lie in the Balkans. Around the year 340, the town of Stridon in Dalmatia was located on the movable border to Pannonia. Jerome was born about there, about then.

In a sense, it is fitting for the patron saint of translators to derive from this crucible of ethnic groups and cultures and languages. But Eusebius Hieronymus Sophronius was never to become a builder of bridges between the antagonists in the Balkans.

After scholarly yet convivial studies in Rome and penitence as a monk in Aquileia, Jerome spent five years as a hermit in the desert in Palestine, struggling with his violent passions. He found a remedy in the study of Hebrew; some would say a wilderness exile in itself.

He was then ordained to the priesthood in Antioch and spent a few years in Constantinople translating into Latin and working on his history of the world, until the year 382, when he received a papal commission to revise the Latin Bible, in which the Old Testament had been translated from the Septuagint. In other words, he was asked to make a second-hand translation of the oldest Greek translation of the Old Testament. Jerome, who knew Hebrew, regarded with scepticism the story about the seventy translators (hence the name Septuagint) who had produced exactly identical translations of the Old Testament from Hebrew to Greek: proof that the Hebrew-speaking voice of God had been rendered correctly in Greek. Jerome was thorough enough to retranslate almost all of the Old Testament from the original text, in the language he believed all people had spoken before the events at Shinar. He translated the New Testament and the Psalms from approved Greek texts. We know the collective result as the Vulgate, the Bible of the Church of Rome and the Middle Ages, Gutenberg’s Bible, even – and still today the Latin Bible text used in the Roman Catholic Church. Jerome’s version, which took him twenty-three years to complete, did not become the versio vulgata (‘the generally accepted version’) immediately, but it gained acceptance gradually. (Indeed, it was not authorised by the Council of Trent until 1546, at approximately the same time as the revised Luther-Bible appeared.)

It was not only Jerome’s translation of the Bible that met with resistance in Rome; he became equally unpopular because of his relationship with the city’s noble ladies. He tempted the ladies – to ‘asceticism’. In 385, angry at not becoming Pope Damasus’ successor, he went so far as to persuade his lady friends to accompany him to Bethlehem, where he founded a monastery and convent and where he died in the year 420. According to Moltesen,¹ Jerome was:

the most learned and least likeable of the Church Fathers. He was a professed egocentric even during the most extreme ascetic exercises, a child of a decadent culture, whom Christianity was not able to defeat. Only his love of learning and books seems to have been genuine.

His love of asceticism and his defence of celibacy may have been prerequisites for his translation work and Jerome was the first to warn translators against marrying; not only does translating take up all one’s time and attention, it does not provide for the ‘support’ of a family either.

Like so many translators, Jerome engaged in other writing activities; he wrote Bible commentaries, crude polemics against his opponents, and homilies to monks, which are considered to be precursors of the religious novel. In everything he was a mediator: to Western culture he conveyed knowledge of the monastic life of the East, of the learning of the Greek Church and of Hebrew wisdom. Conversely, he asserted the authority of Rome in matters of dogma. In this he may be said to have been somewhat opportunistic – for example in renouncing his partiality to the teachings of Origen when the latter was denounced as a Neo-Platonist for his teaching of apokatâstasis (that the purification and restoration of all beings is the goal of world history).

The canonised egocentric St Jerome lives on as the patron saint of translators, and International Translators’ Day is celebrated on 30 September, the anniversary of the Dalmatian’s death.

Although the paths of translators are often thorny, Jerome was not canonised for removing a thorn from a lion’s paw, but because his works achieved such wide circulation. Part of the secret of his success, undoubtedly, lay in his translation ‘method’ or his attitude towards the special interpretative task.

If I am to interpret the Holy Scriptures from Greek, I must translate freely, Jerome writes in a letter to Pammachius, “I cannot translate word for word, but must express sense for sense”; “Non verbum e verbo sed sensum exprimere de sensu” (Snell-Hornby 1988: 9).

This ‘modern’ attitude, that one should not translate word for word, but sense for sense, contrasted sharply with the contemporary dogma of literal Bible translation. But for Jerome, therefore, the fear of authority was less intense than the desire to convey the ‘sense’ or ‘message’ of the biblical text (cf. the discussion of Nida, pp. 27–28).

Yet the history of translation theory did not begin with Jerome. Cicero (106–43 BC) is generally mentioned as the first theorist (46 BC), and it was he who first admonished against translating word for word, non verbum pro verbo, and against interpretation. Cicero attaches importance to the style and effect of the words, viewing the text with an orator’s eye. He finds support in Horace, (approximately twenty years later) who values target language aesthetics above the stilted ‘fidelity’ of literal translation. Horace warns against exaggerated use of loan words from the original, at the same time as he stresses the importance of enriching the target language with words from translations. Implicit in this picture is the assumption made in the Roman literary tradition that the reader already knew the Greek original. Therefore, the recreations by Roman men of letters of the Greek canon were rhetorical tours de force in a language of art, rather than the transmission of a literary treasure (Ulriksen 1991: 194–216; Bassnett 1980: 43–45).

It is thus in ancient Rome, in connection with translations and imitations of Greek literature, that one finds the first theoretical observations about the art of translation. To be sure, the ancient Sumerians translated even earlier (into Akkadian, a Semitic language) and wrote commentaries to their translations in the form of glossaries and grammatical paradigms. Their lexicographical and morphological notes are based on actual correspondences found in bilingual texts written by bilinguals, but it is difficult to deduce a specific approach to translation from these, let alone a theory (Hovdhaugen 1982: 14–17).

Wulfila (311–383), who had to invent an alphabet to enable him to translate the Bible into Gothic, did not develop a theory of translation either, though he was sufficiently aware of the functional aspect of his work that he wished to spare his target group, the aggressive Goths, further inflammatory portrayals of war by editing out the Books of Kings. What he did translate, he translated conscientiously, using Greek word order and syntax. Throughout the forty years of his episcopacy, Wulfila translated via Greek into this new written language, which was in a process of dying out at the same time; yet he created a number of idioms that survive in the Germanic languages. However, Jerome’s Latin Vulgate was the common Bible for Germanic speakers until Luther’s day.

Cyril (c. 827–869) of Thessalonica, who translated the Bible into Slavic, also had to invent an alphabet. He and his elder brother Methodius (c. 825–885) were familiar with Wulfila’s translation into Gothic and wanted to devise a writing system for use in Christian missions and diplomatic campaigns among the Slavs. Cyril obtained the Byzantine emperor’s and patriarch’s consent to receive a Slavic alphabet as a revelation from the Lord (Delisle and Woodsworth 1995: 14). Cyril developed a writing system for what we now know as Old Church Slavonic with the aid of a sound-method (and with the help of Methodius) and translated the Holy Scriptures. Soon the Latin liturgy was replaced in Moravia by one in Slavic, based on translations, and both brothers were rewarded with Episcopal status by Pope Adrian II. Methodius completed the Bible translation after Cyril’s death. Both were eventually canonised, but the writing system was named only for St Cyril: the Cyrillic alphabet.²

In 1540, Étienne Dolet (1509–46) wrote a short work entitled La manière de bien traduire d’une langue en aultre, in which he lists five principles for good translation:

1. The translator must completely reproduce the sense and purpose of the original author, though he has the right to clear up any confusion.

2. The translator must have outstanding knowledge of both the source language and the target language.

3. The translator must avoid translating word for word.

4. The translator must use prevailing modes of expression.

5. The translator must choose words and word order that create the proper tone.

Dolet stresses ‘understanding’ of both the original text and the translated text, stating that knowledge of and ‘feeling’ for the source text are as important as consideration for what may be called the target ‘context’.

Étienne Dolet was actually executed because he ‘mistranslated’ a passage from one of Plato’s dialogues (Axiochus), in such way that the text expressed doubt about the immortality of the soul. He was said to have dealt too freely with the original, adding several words of his own accord. That was going too far. Étienne Dolet was burnt, together with his books. Thus he achieved immortality.

Martin Luther defended the same basic principles as Jerome, whose Latin Bible Luther’s supplanted. The Bible is God’s Word, and the Lord’s ‘message’ must be ‘conveyed’. So it is not the words, but the Word, i.e. the ‘message’, that must be recast in modern speech to allow it to be conveyed to a modern audience. Luther’s Bible is known as innovative with its lush and vivid colloquial German and its user-friendly structure. Luther expressed clear views on the theory of translation in his Sendebrief vom Dolmetschen of 1530 (see pp. 204ff) where he maintained that a Bible translator must be pious, diligent, fearful and faithful, and, furthermore listens to the common masses. Luther’s Bible is said to represent ‘target-language-orientation’ in the history of translation, as opposed to the so-called ‘source-language-orientation’.³ However, it is doubtful whether such a division has any merit.

John Wycliffe (1330–84) translated the Bible into colloquial English precisely so that the common people might gain access to the sacred text in a language they could understood, and throughout the 1400s several Bibles appeared in the Wycliffe tradition. In many ways Wycliffe was a pioneer, both as a founder of English prose and as a critic of corruption in the Catholic Church, the sale of indulgences, celibacy, confession and the veneration of the saints – long before Luther. And Erasmus Rotterodamus’ translation of the New Testament into Latin (1516) was actually the basis of Luther’s.

William Tyndale’s (1494–1536) Bible, too, was intended to be as clear and comprehensible as possible for the common people. Tyndale was accused of heresy and subversion; he lost his clerical post early on and received none of the Episcopal support required for his translation work. His translation of the New Testament was burnt in 1526, and his later translations were smuggled into England from the Continent. Tyndale translated directly from the Hebrew and Greek sources, maintaining that English was richer and more receptive to these original languages than Latin was. To a great extent, he used words of wisdom and expressions from his native Gloucestershire, creating a forceful rhetoric based on the rhythmical syntax and tone of popular speech, and he had contributed more to the development of the English language than Shakespeare: It is Tyndale’s translation that forms the basis for the King James Bible, also known as The Authorised Version of 1611. Indeed, Tyndale is the English Luther – was in fact in contact with Luther before, in exile on the Continent, translating the Pentateuch from Hebrew. William Tyndale was denounced, strangled at the stake, and burnt on 6 October 1536.

One wonders why Jerome, and not Tyndale or Dolet, has been proclaimed the patron saint of translators. Perhaps International Translators’ Day should be moved from the anniversary of Jerome’s death to 6 October?

Let us briefly touch on Joachim du Bellay (1522–60), who formulated what has been called an ‘anti-translation theory’ (Pedersen 1987: 18). In 1549, du Bellay published his Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse, in which he argues against attempts at ‘translating’ the classics, since oratory is inextricably bound to the individual language. Rather, if a language is to be enriched, it must be through ‘imitation’ of the best Greek and Latin authors. In particular, poetry was untranslatable.

In the preface to his translation of Ovid’s Epistles (1680), John Dryden (1631–1700) lists three kinds of translation: (1) metaphrase, (2) paraphrase and (3) imitation. Dryden prefers method number two, the so-called ‘paraphrase’ or ‘translation with latitude’, the most balanced, a method “in whic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Science of Translation and Translation Studies
• 2. The Author and the Translator
• 3. Word Play and Language Games
• 4. Syntax - A Chapter All of Its Own
• 5. Hot Tin Roofs, Squeaking Snow and Other Cultural Biotopes
• 6. What It's All About
• 7. The Process of Translation - Mysterium Conjuntionis
• References
• Index