Early Theories of Translation

Denham, however, justifies the procedure for reasons which must have had their appeal for the translator who was conscious of real creative power. "Poesy," he says in the prefac...

The growing dignity of this department of literature and the Augustan fondness for literary criticism combined to produce a large body of comment on methods of translation. The...

Occasionally one can find a reason for the insertion of the phrase in a given place. Sometimes its presence suggests that the translator has come upon an unfamiliar word. In _Si...

In a less exalted strain come suggestions that the translator's work is valuable enough to deserve some tangible recognition. Thomas Fortescue urges his reader to consider the c...

Yet behind these well-sounding phrases there lay, one suspects, little vigorous thought. Both the clarity and the honesty which belong to Dryden's utterances are absent from muc...

The Bible also had an advantage over other translations in that the idea of _progress_ towards an accurate version early arose. Unlike the translators of secular works, who freq...

The questions most definitely discussed by those concerned in the translation of the Bible were questions of vocabulary. Primarily most of these discussions centered around poin...

Why such a situation existed may be partially explained. The Elizabethan writer was almost as slow as his medieval predecessor to make distinctions between different kinds of li...

But beyond this there was little to encourage the translator. His audience, as compared with the learned and the refined, who read Latin and French, was ignorant and undiscrimin...

This medieval quality, less excusable later in the century when the new learning had declared itself, appears with more justification in the comment of the early sixteenth centu...

In the following pages I have attempted to trace certain developments in the theory of translation as it has been formulated by English writers. I have confined myself, of neces...

At first there was some idea of creating for such songs a vogue in England like that which the similar productions of Marot had enjoyed at the French court. Translators felt fre...

None of these men point out the relationship between the style of the original and the style to be employed in the English rendering. Caxton, the last writer to be considered in...

Thomas Wilson, who dedicated his translation of Demosthenes to Sir William Cecil in 1570, links himself with the earlier group of translators by his detailed references to Cheke...

The truth is that, in translated as in original literature the permanent and the transitory elements are often oddly mingled. The fate of Pope's Homer helps us to reconcile two...