Modalities of Western Enlightenment Text Translation in the 18th Century Romanian Culture

Abstract

Western European Enlightenment had a considerable influence upon the Romanian Provinces. Despite unfavourable political, historical and geographical conditions, the Romanian scholars were attracted and influenced by Enlightenment ideas. In this context, books, that held a very important part, had to be translated in order to be put at the disposal of potential beneficiaries. In the 18th century, translation fidelity principles with respect to the original text were not rigorously established and translators used to intervene to comply with the needs of the recipients of their work. At the beginning, the contact with western books was intermediated by other languages, as the Romanian translators could not have access to original writings but only to their translations into Greek, German, Polish or Russian, translations already unfaithful by themselves. Towards the end of the 18th century, a political easing period allowed intellectuals to directly obtain the original writings. According to the faithfulness to the original, we observed and comment several types of intervention by the translator: compressions, omissions, alternation of prose and verse, selective translations, adaptations, elaborations, summarization etc. The paper also presents the way they mixed in some translations used as examples (Cornaro, Delaporte, Fontenelle, Botero, Halima). Though some faithful translations existed the modern concept of respect for the original text has been implemented by the Romanian scholars starting with the 19th century. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n10p623