Translation difficulties in the Romanian version of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Aphorisms. A contrastive and diachronic analysis (I)
Translation difficulties in the Romanian version of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Aphorisms. A contrastive and diachronic analysis (I)

Summary/Abstract: The present paper concentrates on a late work of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, and on its only Romanian version, delivered at the end of the 19th century by Titu Maiorescu. The existence of five editions of this Romanian version, that have been published by the translator himself during a period of 40 years, represents a clear proof of the fact that transposing a German philosophical text into Romanian involved a series of translating difficulties. Observing the way Titu Maiorescu tried to overcome these difficulties by adopting specific translation solutions produced an analysis which was conducted from the linguistic perspective and which followed two directions: the contrastive one (as a result of direct comparison between source-text and target-text) and the diachronic one (which considered the interventions made by the same translator on his own text at different points in time). The linguistic analysis of a philosophical text was considered to be the most appropriate and useful approach not only for the present research, but also for future translators of the Aphorisms, who would aim at adapting the discourse of Titu Maiorescu’s version to the contemporary Romanian language, by taking into consideration its obvious evolution, especially in terms of its philosophical vocabulary.

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