| Paper 514-b | Textual Tourism: The Travels (and Travails) of Translations
(Language: English)
Margaret Mary Raftery, Department of English & Classical Languages, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein
Index terms: Language and Literature - Comparative, Language and Literature - Dutch, Language and Literature - Middle English, Printing History |
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| Paper 514-c | Travel and Exploration in John Florio's A Worlde of Wordes
(Language: English)
Víctor Andrés Peña Blas, Facultad de Letras, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real
Index terms: Geography and Settlement Studies, Language and Literature - Comparative, Language and Literature - Italian, Social History |
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| Abstract | Paper -a:
The manuscripts Durham Cathedral C IV 27 I and Lincoln Cathedral 104 contain a series of Anglo-Norman texts where the history of Britain is presented as a succession of travels and wars, from the legendary journey of the Trojan eponymous Brut down to the adventures of the later invaders. The survival of these stories of wanderings depends on the concrete travel of words on parchment. While the two manuscripts share the same materials, they are written within a century between each other (12th-13th centuries) and show many differences. Their study allows a special view on two stages of the journey undertaken by texts in the paths of book production.
Paper -b:
The advent of printing made it far more easy for books to 'travel' - often as translations - their 'travel agents' being publishers and their 'tour guides' booksellers (in the Middle Ages and the early modern period, often one and the same). This paper will attempt to review the activities of two late medieval/early modern publishers very prolific in the field of English/Dutch translation: Jan van Doesborch and Willem Vorsterman. It will focus on types of texts, in an attempt to assess the two publishers' possibly different conceptions of their respective markets and their likely reception of translated foreign texts - which would 'travel well'. By means of a close comparison of certain key translated passages, it will also attempt to determine how the (often anonymous) translators visualised their task of 'conveying' the tenor of their texts. Here, alongside late medieval/early modern generic categories, certain concepts drawn from modern translation theory (such as 'faithfulness', 'adequacy', and 'defamiliarisation') should prove useful.
Paper -c:
John Florio was an Elizabethan lexicographer, translator, Italian tutor at court, and professor at Oxford. He published A Worlde of Wordes, an Italian-English Dictionary, in 1598. This massive lexicographic work reflects Renaissance knowledge in the form of definitions. However, these definitions still convey assumptions inherited from either medieval manuscripts (e.g., animals are described with mythological features) or works from the Age of Discovery (e.g., cultural terms from Africa, Turkey, Arabia, Ormuz, India, and China). This contribution will attempt to show how the knowledge acquired through travel and exploration can be condensed in a bilingual dictionary.
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