9. Principles of translation of ecclesiastic and secular works during the Middle Ages. The Vulgate and St. Jerome’s principles of translation.

The Middle Ages (ca. 500 AD -1450 AD) are characterized bya general lack of progress and a constant stagnation in many spheres of mental activity including translation and interpretation, which continued to be practised, however, in the domains of ecclesiastic science and the church. Thus, interpreting from Greek into Latin is known to have been regularly employed in the 6 the century AD by the Roman church. Word-for –word translation was widely practiced in the famous Toledo school in the central Spain (12-13centuries) where the outstanding translator of that country Gerhard of Cremona worked. Among the works translated there were scientific (as alchemy), mathematical works (on arithmetic, algebra, geometry, physics, astronomy), philosophy, medicine. However, in Northern Spain another school of translation functioned where “sense-to-sense” approach was predominant and translations there were mostly performed from Greek into Hebrew (usually through Arabic). These same two principles, according to Solomon Ibn Ajjub, one of the greatest authorities on translation in the middle of the 13thcentury, were practiced in the southern Italian school (Rome), which had fallen under a strong Arabic cultural influence as well. Secular works were translated in this school with many omissions, additions, and paraphrases of their texts, which changed the original works beyond recognition. King Alfred the Great took an active part in translating manuals, chronicles and other works from ancient languages and thus helped in the spiritual and cultural elevation of his people. His noble was continued by the abbot and the author Aelfric (955-1020) who would paraphrase some parts of the work while translating and adding his own part. Yet, Aelfric would consider this technique of rendering as a sense-to-sense translation. Abbot Aelfric himself admitted, that in his translation of the Latin work under the English title The Shepherd’s Book, he performed it “sometimes word-by-word” and “sometimes according to the sense”, in free translation. These same 2 approaches to translation were also characteristic of other European countries of the Middle Ages. No less intensively practiced alongside of the free sense-to-sense rendering in Europe during the Middle Ages was the strict word-for-word translation. Its domain of employment was naturally restricted to ecclesiastic and philosophic works. By this method the first ever translation of the Bible from Latin into English was accomplished in 1377-1380 by the religious scientist and reformer John Wycliffe.

10. Domestication as a method of enriching national literatures.

Domestication and foreignization are strategies in translation, regarding the degree to which translators make a text conform to the target culture. Domestication is the strategy of making text closely conform to the culture of the language being translated to, which may involve the loss of information from the source text. Foreignization is the strategy of retaining information from the source text, and involves deliberately breaking the conventions of the target language to preserve its meaning. These strategies have been debated for hundreds of years, but the first person to formulate them in their modern sense was Lawrence Venuti, who introduced them to the field of translation studies in 1995 with his book The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation.Venuti's innovation to the field was his view that the dichotomy between domestication and foreignization was an ideological one; he views foreignization as the ethical choice for translators to make.

According to Lawrence Venuti, every translator should look at the translation process through the prism of culture which refracts the source language cultural norms and it is the translator’s task to convey them, preserving their meaning and their foreignness, to the target-language text. Every step in the translation process—from the selection of foreign texts to the implementation of translation strategies to the editing, reviewing, and reading of translations—is mediated by the diverse cultural values that circulate in the target language.

He estimates that the theory and practice of English-language translation has been dominated by submission, by fluent domestication. He strictly criticized the translators who in order to minimize the foreignness of the target text reduce the foreign cultural norms to target-language cultural values. According to Venuti, the domesticating strategy “violently” erases the cultural values and thus creates a text which as if had been written in the target language and which follows the cultural norms of the target reader. He strongly advocates the foreignization strategy, considering it to be “an ethnodeviant pressure on [target-language cultural] values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad.” Thus an adequate translation would be the one that would highlight the foreignness of the source text and instead of allowing the dominant target culture to assimilate the differences of the source culture, it should rather signal these differences.