Polish Seventeenth-Century Translations of Jesuit Accounts from the Far East in the Context of Translation History
Polish Seventeenth-Century Translations of Jesuit Accounts from the Far East in the Context of Translation History

Summary/Abstract: Right from the beginning of their missionary activity, the Jesuits painstakingly drafted and collected various documents. These accounts were printed in Latin or Italian, and soon translated into other languages. In Poland, in the first three decades of the seventeenth century, more than a dozen reports from China, Japan, Vietnam, and Tibet were printed. They provide first eye-witness accounts from these territories, not only in Poland, but in Europe at large. Polish translations offer material for various kinds of analysis. This article discusses the work of two Polish translators, members of the Society of Jesus, who used different strategies depending on their intended target readership. Szymon Wysocki was interested mainly in religious aspects of the missions to the Far East, and he edited out most of the culture-specific items, as his writing was dedicated to young adepts of the Society. Fryderyk Szembek, on the other hand, paid attention also to cultural aspects of the accounts he translated. However, his attitude towards cultural otherness was less neutral than in the source texts. His translations constituted an important source of knowledge for the seventeenth-century Polish reader. Both translators had to cope with challenges such as proper names or culturally marked vocabulary and with the genre specificity of these texts, which were new to the Polish literary system. In my research, I use the methodological framework of polysystem theory, Lefevere’s theory of rewriting, and Pym’s concepts in the history of translation. I also refer to translation sociology, theory of reportage, history of culture, and history of languages.

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