Author’s Style and Translator’s Style in the Old Church Slavonic Hagiography Cover Image
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Авторски и преводачески стил в старобъл-гарската агиография
Author’s Style and Translator’s Style in the Old Church Slavonic Hagiography

Author(s): Aneta Dimitrova
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Институт за литература - БАН

Summary/Abstract: As Old Church Slavonic (OCS) translations of Byzantine prose are called in question, some of the most debated issues concern the principles of translation. This article draws attention to the importance of analyzing the linguistic features of the original as well. Byzantine Greek and OCS are structurally similar. Syntactic synonymy results in both author and translator having to choose between several options. A close study of their preferences makes it possible to differentiate between the style 177 of the original and that of the translation. On the other hand, the two languages differ in various ways. By the 9th century there is already a big difference between spoken and literary Greek so that the authors’ styles depend on their educationand purposes, on the genre or the literary trends of the time. OCS, by comparison, is a young literary language, based on the vernacular and occasionally exposed to Greek influence. There are also many linguistic differences between them. In each case of linguistic asymmetry the translator has to pick out between possible solutions and it is on these choices that we can draw conclusions about the style and the methods of translation. The article gives several examples of how one can draw a conclusion about the author’s or the translator’s style based on linguistic data. The examples are from three Byzantine Vitae (4th–10th c.) translated into OCS during 10th–11th c. and they deal mainly with the use of infinitives and the Greek definite article. At the end some syntactical criteria are derived for analyzing both original and translation.

  • Issue Year: 2012
  • Issue No: 45-46
  • Page Range: 165-177
  • Page Count: 13
  • Language: Bulgarian