SFB 644 I-II: Translation and Antiquity (TP B 7)

<p>Translation, designating a transposition from any system of signs to any other, has become a key concept in the humanities. This project understands translation primarily as an inter-linguistic transformation without, however, reducing it to linguistic processes. Instead, we will examine and take into account the conceptions of antiquity a given translator and his cultural environment subscribe to and on which this transformation is based.</p>
<p>During the first grant period (2005-2008), we focussed on approaches to the theory of translation developed during the past 200 years in connection with the translation of ancient literature. Our examination also considered a number of previously little-known conceptions, including those of Karl Solger, Ludwig Seeger, Adolf Wilbrandt, and Tycho Mommsen, allowing us to place the more prominent writings of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, and Wolfgang Schadewaldt in their respective contexts and to elucidate the premises of current debates.</p>
<p>The results of these studies form the basis on which, in the current grant period (2009-2012), we will collect translations of ancient literature into German from the past 200 years in order to analyze them with a view to cultural and pragmatic aspects. The focus of the project's work will be on examining the interaction between the practice of translation and the formation of theory, and on developing a systematic set of criteria to describe translations. The three criteria defined by Wolfgang Schadewaldt that serve as the point of departure the completeness of a translation, the reproduction of idiomatic imagery, and the preservation of the sequence of ideas in the original can be seen as corresponding to the linguistic principles of textual cohesion and coherence, functional sentence perspective, and semantics; additional questions concern issues of lexis and literary conventions or generic styles.</p>
<p>Translations of ancient literature from the past 200 years form an extraordinarily multifaceted and densely structured field of study closely tied to cultural and political developments, which lends them great significance for larger questions within and beyond the purview of the Collaborative Research Center. The size of our corpus of texts, however, also makes it necessary to work selectively. The subprojects are accordingly devoted to individual authors selected as exemplary representatives of problems of the translation of literary genres and linguistic forms (epic, historiography, novel, lyric poetry, rhetoric, philosophy; verse and prose; Greek and Latin not included are the dramatic genres, which will be addressed during a possible third grant period.)</p>
<p>At the same time, we will continue to work on a database encompassing translations of ancient authors from the past 200 years that offers bibliographic details as well as a wealth of additional information.</p>