Culture language and foreign names adaptation during the pre-modern Romanian
Culture language and foreign names adaptation during the pre-modern Romanian

Summary/Abstract: Translation is an act of “negotiation” between two or more cultural systems and languages, being mediated by a translator and carrying both the traces of the mediator and those of the translation context. We aim at investigating the impact of culture languages on foreign names translation into Romanian at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the next. We consider several types of situations. Sometimes, the culture language is also the expression of the reference universe of names, even if they occur in texts whose sources were written in other languages than the respective culture language; in this case, the language of the source text plays the role of an intermediary. In some other instances, the culture language plays the role of a model that determines the name form in the target language, without being directly involved in the act of translation. Translators from the pre-modern stage of Romanian have often substituted the forms from different vernacular languages such as German, French or Italian by a variant received under the influence of a specific culture language, i.e. Greek or Latin.

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