language stuff

[aryanhwy]

I'm currently translating the section on metaphysics in Jacob Lorhard's 1606 book Ogdoas Scholastica. This has been an interesting exercise in various respects - it's my first foray into 17th-century Latin, my first translation which will be used by people other than me (and so I can't leave vague questions and bad grammar in it!), it isn't really a narrative or an argument, but rather one huge complicated flow-chart. (Take a look at the first page.), and it's written by a 17th-century philosopher.

I've run into a number of interesting things.

- There's a couple of places, more than I'd like unfortunately, where I'm not translating anything, because the best corresponding modern English phrase simply IS the Latin. (E.g. the distinction between simpliciter and secundum quid. And sometimes I'm torn between leaving realiter as it is and finding a clunky translation.) I feel a bit weird that there is so much Latin in a text which I'm technically supposed to be translating out of Latin! It'd be like finding filet mignon over and over in a text you're translating from French to English.
- This is crammed full of technical vocabulary where the Latinization is very superficial, and you can basically hack of the ending and have a word. However, it's not necessarily a word that you'd find it common use. I've found myself often heading to the OED to find out "is 'accidentality' a REAL word?" And if I can find a 17th-century citation for the word, even if those are the only citations listed, I'll use it. After all, a translation of a 17th-C Latin word into 17th-C English vocabulary will probably result in something closer to the original, and people who are reading this should be smart enough to figure out what accidentality is.
- On the other hand, because I'm using so many rather antiquated words, I feel like I'm giving the reader silent instruction to "when faced with an unusual or unexpected word, read it as if this was the 17th century". Then I come to things like quasi partes. I want to be able to translate this into a rather nice modern idiom, "virtual parts", but given my implicit instruction to the reader based on my use of other words, I'm afraid that this will end up being read in a 17th-century mindset, too, when what I want is it to be read modernly!

I'm really enjoying all these intricacies and tricky bits. There is a lot more depth and width to translating than I ever realized before I started.

Comments

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

The translation is going to be an adjunct to a paper someone else is writing which is geared to a technical/philosophical/historical/linguistic audience, so I have no problems using the technical terms. They're all things you'd be able to figure out if you have a good dictionary, so I'd use them even if this was going to be for a broader audience, I think.

[tedeisenstein.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but for you a "broader audience" may not be what us non-grad-student non-philosopher non-academics mortal think of when we hear the term . . . :-)

(I can say that, being the son of two academics, the brother of a third, and the uncle to an up-and-coming academic - and it still amazes me how much even historians can argue about the minor specifics of some terms.)