Did Renaissance England Have a Problem with Indirect Translation?

• Published in: Philological quarterly Vol. 102; no. 2-3; pp. 255 - 274
• Main Author: Morini, Massimiliano
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Iowa City University of Iowa 22.03.2023; University of Iowa, Philological Quarterly
• Subjects: 16th century; British history; Criticism and interpretation; Cultural factors; Culture; Early Modern English; English language; English literature, 1485-1603 (English Renaissance period); English literature, 1500-1660 (Renaissance); Historians; History; History of translation; Hypotheses; Interpreters; Linguistics; Mediation; Norms; Renaissance period; Translating and interpreting; Translation (Languages); Translations; Translators; United Kingdom; Greece; France
• ISSN: 0031-7977; 2169-5342

In the last decade, a substantial number of studies have tried to answer those questions, mainly, though not exclusively, with reference to the contemporary Western world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most general of those studies seem to have reached two sets of related conclusions: on the one hand, indirect translation is as a rule not viewed favorably, and its existence tends to be kept silent or actively denied; on the other, as Hanna Pieta put it as recently as 2019, ITr is still very much "alive and kicking in today's society." While it is relatively easy to gauge the feelings and reactions of one's contemporaries or near-contemporaries, one must be wary of applying one's values to cultural phases which ran their course several centuries ago. Translation norms influence translators' behavior, but they also have their bearing in the judgments of translation historians. In terms of cultural distance from the present, it seems particularly difficult to take the measure of the English Renaissance, for a set of complex related reasons. In practical terms, and particularly if one focuses on the sixteenth century, early modern English translators appear to behave in contradictory ways.