Week 3 Readings, or The Epochs of Translation

This week we looked at three ‘historical statements’ on translation: John Dryden’s “Preface to Ovid’s Epistles” (1680), Friedrich Schleiermacher ’s thorough investigation “On the different methods of translating” (1813) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s short essay on translation (1819). Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, the latter two works were translated from early-nineteenth-century German, while the first, written in late-seventeenth-century English, presents its own challenges for the modern reader. Each of these works attempts to delineate and assess the value of different approaches to the act of translation.

Dryden and Goethe both identify three kinds of translation. Dryden’s spectrum ranges from Metaphrase, or a word-for-word translation, to Paraphrase, which maintains the meaning of the text but diverges from the words themselves, to Imitation, whereby the translator assumes the freedom to diverge from the content and form of the text, to “write like one who has written before him on the same subject.”¹ Goethe’s varieties frame approaches to translation differently. His categories include a ‘plain prose translation,’ which maintains the meaning as nearly as possible but “neutralizes the formal characteristics,” a ‘parodistic’ option, through which the translator appropriates the ideas of an original work, and a final option in which the translation is indistinguishable from the original.² Dealing mainly with poetry, Goethe concludes that the work that can most closely approximate the stylistic features of the original is the superior translation. Dryden, on the other hand, believes the maintenance of meaning to be the most important job of the translator.

Schleiermacher, for his part, offers a more nuanced analysis of the advantages and limits of various approaches to translation. He subdivides the process into numerous pairs of concepts (interpretation and translation proper, imitation and paraphrase, bringing the author to the reader or the reader to the author, emphasizing the musical element or the logical element) and comes to the conclusion that different emphases and different approaches are appropriate to different types of texts. Schleiermacher, who was a proponent of liberal Christianity, was loathe to impose a dogmatic ideology on the translator. He prefigured the modern open-ended view of Translation Studies by being content to weigh the pros and cons of various positions, leaving it to others to “outline a set of instructions referring to the different rhetorical genres, and […] compare and judge the most admirable efforts that have been made according to both views, and by these means elucidate the matter even further.”³ In other words, he anticipated James S. Holmes’s call for the establishment of Translation Studies as an empirical discipline that seeks to “describe the phenomena of translating and translation(s) as they manifest themselves” and to “establish general principles by which these phenomena can be explained and predicted,” by more than a century.⁴

Matt Robertshaw

28 September, 2017

¹ John Dryden, “From the Preface to Ovid’s Epistles,” in The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd ed., ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York; London: Routledge, 2012), 40. 

² Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Translations,” in The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd ed., ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York; London: Routledge, 2012), 64-65.

³ Friedrich Schleiermacher, “On the different methods of translating,” in The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd ed., ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York; London: Routledge, 2012), 50.

⁴ James S. Holmes, “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies,” in The Translation Studies Reader, 1st ed., ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York; London: Routledge, 2000), 176.

Sources:

Dryden, John. “From the Preface to Ovid’s Epistles.” In The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd ed., edited by Lawrence Venuti, 38-42. New York; London: Routledge, 2012.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Translations.” In The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd ed., edited by Lawrence Venuti, 64-66. New York; London: Routledge, 2012.

Holmes, James S. “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies.” In The Translation Studies Reader, 1st ed., edited by Lawrence Venuti, 172-185. New York; London: Routledge, 2000.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. “On the different methods of translating.” In The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd ed., edited by Lawrence Venuti, 43-63. New York; London: Routledge, 2012.