Translation in the Middle Ages

The Middle Ages was the period when the Christian religion became firmly established. Naturally, the main object of translation was the Bible. At first, it was translated from Hebrew and Greek to Latin mostly. Latin had status as the target language, since it was the international language in science and church.

In the Middle Ages, the Holy Writ was believed to be a sacred book “where even the word order holds a mystery”,63 not to be touched or changed. Therefore, transforming the form and content was considered to be a serious heresy, which resulted in the predominance of the literal translation of the Bible.

The greatest event in the early Middle Ages was the Bible as translated by St. Jerome (342-419/20). His Bible, known as the Vulgate, or standard Latin Bible, had great influence on succeeding generations of translators. During the Renaissance, he was regarded as the archetype of the humanist scholar, devoted to the beauty of correct form and language. Despite the fact that he had been neither a miracle worker nor a martyr to his faith, he was regarded as one of the Christian saints until the 17^th century, and recently the International Federation of Translators (FIT) has proclaimed Jerome’s feast day (September 30) International Translators Day.64

Two years later, in the 4^th century A.D., the Bible was translated into Gothic, a Teutonic language by Bishop Wulfila (Ulfilas).

Of great significance in the history of translation was a translation school established in the 9^th century by the Anglo-Saxon king Alfred the Great. He inspired translators, who were mostly monks, to translate five Latin works into Old English. That was the first attempt at translating, as Alfred put it, “books that all men should know into the language that we can all understand,”65 or the vernacular, mother tongue. The choice of source texts testifies to the wisdom of the king who would educate his people: books in history, geography, philosophy, theology, and ethics. The translation was mostly literal. One of the translators of those days was Aelfric (9-10^th c.), who made the first Latin to English glossary, an appendix to Latin Grammar; he claimed that translated words should preserve special features of the source language.

While the scientific text translation in those times was overly faithful to the source text, translations of fiction were, on the other hand, reworkings, conscious borrowings, and free adaptations of the ancient texts to the tastes and requirements of the translator’s community. To create a new work, a translator could combine several texts, extract and shift episodes, extend description of some abstracts, omit outdated phenomena and attitudes and so on. Therefore, these works might be called expositions rather than translations.

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