Tożsamość kulturowa (religijna) a wybory tłumacza

Abstract

This paper discusses the influence of cultural, especially religious, identity on the translator’s work on the basis of texts rendered in the sixteenth century. The study investigates levels at which the translator interfered in the structure or meaning of the text. The texts analyzed can be distinctly divided into two groups. The first one comprises religious writings which had to be translated faithfully in order to render the meaning of the source text. In this case, the challenge for the translator was the lexis. On the one hand, due to the lack of equivalents of certain referents, the translator had to find a manner of rendering even those passages that described issues which were totally unfamiliar to the Polish culture. On the other hand, they had to decide how to translate proper names. As proper names often both denoted and symbolized certain concepts or items, the translator could try to either render them with Polish appellatives which would reflect their meaning or leave them in the source language. Moreover, the translation was also marked with the style of the source text and the use of language resources. In order to illustrate the issue, the paper presents examples of how sixteenth century translators dealt with finding appropriate linguistic devices to properly render both the meaning and the form of the source text.The other, entirely different, type of translator’s work was rendering a text which was significantly dissimilar to their culture and religion. In this respect, the paper includes an analysis of selected passages from the Latin textbook entitled Ex P. Terentii comediis Latinissimae colloquiorum formulae..., which had the form of phrases and whose foreign part was based on excerpts from Terence’s comedies. The study presents the translator’s interference in the meaning in order to minimize the discrepancy between the ancient polytheistic religion of the source text and the Christian beliefs of the translator. The examples presented in the paper lead to the conclusion that the translator’s religion and cultural awareness had considerable influence on their conscious decisions to shape the target text in respect of lexis, grammar, style, and meaning.