Mediating culture through language: Contact-induced phenomena in the early translations of the Gospels (original) (raw)
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The paper aims to show how translation can transfer certain culture-specifi c concepts into a different culture, possibly modifying it. It concentrates on the translation of the Greek preposition ep í into Latin, Gothic and Old Church Slavonic in Luke's Gospel. We argue that, to various extents, translators incorporated results of theological discussion into their language (obviously, this is most clear for Latin, where constructions such as confi do in 'trust in' and fl eo super 'cry over' were created, that did not exist in Classical Latin and still survive in the Romance languages). Through carefull analysis of the various translations found,
Contact-induced phenomena in the early translations of the Gospels
The paper aims to show how translation can transfer certain culture-specifi c concepts into a different culture, possibly modifying it. It concentrates on the translation of the Greek preposition ep í into Latin, Gothic and Old Church Slavonic in Luke's Gospel. We argue that, to various extents, translators incorporated results of theological discussion into their language (obviously, this is most clear for Latin, where constructions such as confi do in 'trust in' and fl eo super 'cry over' were created, that did not exist in Classical Latin and still survive in the Romance languages). Through carefull analysis of the various translations found,
The theological controversies that arose within the Christian Church of Late Antiquity resulted in the convocation of several Ecumenical Councils, where bishops gathered from the whole Christian world to discuss matters of faith and Church politics. The Acts of these Councils include letters, documents relevant to the debates, and most interestingly the allegedly verbatim transcripts of the discussions held there. Bishops from both the Latin and Greek speaking world attended the Councils: the Western representatives normally spoke in Latin, the Eastern ones in Greek, with the mediation of interpreters. A crucial Council was held at Chalcedon in 451, where most participants spoke Greek and the Latin speakers were assisted by interpreters. The original proceedings of this assembly are lost, but we possess a later Greek version, where the Latin utterances have been suppressed, and a Latin version, which is a translation of the original Greek version and occasionally preserves original Latin utterances. Inasmuch as most of the Acts profess to be verbatim transcriptions of actual debates, this extremely long text represents the richest evidence for the spoken Greek and Latin of more or less educated men in antiquity, although the processes of editing and translation must have obscured to some extent the features of spoken language. My research question, in focusing on the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, is manifold: first, I shall attempt to pinpoint traces of spoken Latin as they emerge from the few original Latin utterances preserved and the sometimes over-literal Greek translations and Latin re-translations; second, I shall investigate the very phenomena of translation and re-translation, comparing the Greek and the Latin version where both are available; related to this, I shall try to work out if and to what extent Greek and Latin bureaucratic prose have influenced each other in this text. The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, just like those of the other Ecumenical Councils, have been so far ignored by linguists. A few remarks on the language and the translations are to be found in an article of the editor of the Acts, Eduard Schwartz (1933), and in the introduction to the recent English translation by Price and Gaddis (2005). In addressing issues of spoken language, I follow the syntax- and discourse-based approach to spontaneous spoken language of Miller and Weinert (1998). As for linguistic aspects of translation, I mainly rely on the contrastive linguistic and stylistic approach of Vinay and Darbelnet (1995). References: Miller, J. and Weinert, R. (1998), Spontaneous Spoken Language. Syntax and Discourse (Oxford). Price, R. and Gaddis, M. (2005), The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon (Liverpool). Schwartz, E. (1933), ‘Zweisprachigkeit in den Konzilsakten’, Philologus 88: 245-53. Vinay, J.-P. and Darbelnet, J. (1995), Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation, trans. by J.C. Sager and M.-J. Hamel (Amsterdam and Philadelphia).
Between the Literal and the Literary: Social Background, Linguistic Competence, and the Bible in the Late-antique Latin Translations of the Vita Antonii, 2021
The present study explores verbatim biblical quotations in the two fourth-century translations of the Greek Life of Antony into Latin produced by an anonymous translator and Evagrius of Antioch, respectively. Careful comparison of these translations of the biblical material that was clearly identified as the word of God and thus unlikely to be the subject of a free and creative approach on the part of the translators, yields new insights, not only about the contrasting approaches taken by the two translators but also about their respective literary, linguistic, and theological backgrounds. By offering evidence that the anonymous translator was familiar with the Greek Bible but unacquainted with contemporary Latin versions of the Bible, this study demonstrates that the text of the Bible regarded as authoritative by him was not in Latin but in Greek. Moreover, the study further argues that the anonymous translator’s mechanical and mirror renderings of several specifically Greek syntactical structures suggest that he was not a native speaker of Latin. His word-for-word approach was thus not the result of his conscious decision to be ‘accurate,’ but rather a reflection of his insufficient command of the language into which he was translating. In addition, this study shows that, unlike his anonymous counterpart, Evagrius used for his translation a Latin version of the Bible for which textual parallels can be found in other late antique Latin works, and that he rhetorically embellished and stylistically upgraded the language of the Bible in Latin available to him at the time. This study also provides evidence that Evagrius made use of the older, anonymous translation of the Life in producing his own version.
In this paper we provide an overview of new approaches to New Testament Greek linguistics, in light of recent linguistic trends. The New Testament may be of interest for linguists in many respects: it can be studied from a sociolinguistic, synchronic, and diachronic point of view, and it plays a relevant role also for developments in language contact research, translation studies, corpus linguistics, and digital humanities. Here, we briefly discuss the importance of New Testament Greek in a sociolinguistics perspective and within the history of the Greek language. We also take into account some syntactic changes from Classical Greek in a diachronic perspective, adopting insights from Construction Grammar. Within the same perspective, we observe the issue of language contact through translation. Finally, we show some digital resources for the study of New Testament Greek and its translations, such as electronic corpora, parallel corpora, and Treebanks, together with an exemplification of what kind of research can be carried out on such resources.