Translation in France in the Renaissance period. E. Dolet and his principles of translation.
The new free/unrestricted freedom of translation in France was also practised by the noted poet and translator of Ovid's poems Joachim du Bellay, who in his book Defence et Illustration de la Langue Frangaise (1549) also included some theoretical chapters on translation. Another outstanding translator, publisher and scientist in France was Etienne Dolet. He was put to the stake, however, in 1546 for his free sense-to-sense (and not word-for-word) translation of Socrates' utterances in one of the dialogues with the philosopher Plato. Among other French translators who would widely practise the unrestricted freedom of translation were also Etienne de Laigle, Claude Fontaine, Amyot, and others.
Etienne Dolet was a French scholar, translator and printer. He set up his own printing press in 1538. He published books in Latin and French at first, then mostly in French - many of them translations, including his own translations, among them his own French translations of books he had first written in Latin.
The translator should:
1)1 understand the subject-matter of the original;
2)2 be familiar with both languages involved;
3)3 not translate word for word;
4)4 follow common usage as much as possible;
5)5 use a pleasing style.
18. The belles-infidels’ principle of translation (J. Amyot, N.P. d’Ablancourt and others).
Nicolas Perrot d'Ablancourt (5 April 1606, Châlons-en-Champagne – 17 November 1664, Paris) was a French translator of the Greek and Latin classics into French and a member of the Académie française.
In the prefaces to his translations, Perrot d’Ablancourt set out his principles of translation. He followed the somewhat contentious practice of Valentin Conrart, one of the founding fathers of the Académie française, of modifying or modernising expressions in the original text for reasons of style. While some authors praised the elegance and subtlety of Perrot d’Ablancourt’s translations, a disparaging remark by one of his contemporary critics gave rise to the expression « la belle infidèle ». The French scholar Gilles Ménage is reported to have compared the translation to a woman he had once loved, who was “beautiful, but unfaithful”. This expression was later picked up and popularised by other authors such as Huygens and Voltaire. Some of Perrot d’Ablancourt’s translations are still being edited, and the debate regarding the necessity of absolute fidelity to the source text when translating continues to this day.
Jacques Amyot (French: [amjo]; 30 October 1513 – 6 February 1593), French Renaissance writer and translator, was born of poor parents, at Melun. Professor of Greek and Latin.
He translated seven books of Diodorus Siculus (1554), the Daphnis et Chloë of Longus (1559) and the Opera Moralia of Plutarch (1572). His vigorous and idiomatic version of Plutarch, Vies des hommes illustres, was translated into English by Sir Thomas North, and supplied Shakespeare with materials for his Roman plays. Montaigne said of him, "I give the palm to Jacques Amyot over all our French writers, not only for the simplicity and purity of his language in which he surpasses all others, nor for his constancy to so long an undertaking, nor for his profound learning ... but I am grateful to him especially for his wisdom in choosing so valuable a work."
It was indeed to Plutarch that Amyot devoted his attention. His other translations were subsidiary. The version of Diodorus he did not publish, although the manuscript had been discovered by him. Amyot took great pains to find and interpret correctly the best authorities, but the interest of his books today lies in the style. His translation reads like an original work. The personal method of Plutarch appealed to a generation addicted to memoirs and incapable of any general theory of history. Amyot's book, therefore, obtained an immense popularity, and exercised great influence over successive generations of French writers.
Antoine Le Maistre (1608 – 4 November 1658) was a French Jansenist lawyer, author and translator. His name has also been written as Lemaistre and Le Maître, and he sometimes used the pseudonym of Lamy. Le Maistre became a friend of Jean Racine and dedicated himself to translation work and to writing the lives of saints. At the time of his death, Antoine Le Maistre had begun a new translation of the New Testament. This was continued by his brother Isaac, who became its principal translator. The new work was published in 1667 as Le Nouveau Testament de Nostre Seigneur Jesus Christ: traduit en François selon l'edition Vulgate, avec les differences du Grec, and printed in Amsterdam for Gaspard Migeot, a bookseller of Mons. It thus became known as the Nouveau Testament de Mons, or the Testament of Mons.
Louis-Isaac Lemaistre de Sacy (29 March 1613 – 4 January 1684), a priest of Port-Royal, was a theologian and French humanist. He is best known for his translation of the Bible the most widespread French Bible in the 18th century, also known as the Bible de Port-Royal. In 1650, he published a collection of prayers, the Heures de Port-Royal, in which he translated the highly successful liturgical hymns. De Sacy was imprisoned in the Bastille on 13 May 1666, remaining there until 14 November 1668. He took advantage of this time to complete the translation of the Old Testament into French from the Vulgate begun by his brother Antoine, and thus became the driving force behind a French language translation of the Bible, called the Bible du Port-Royal or Bible de Sacy. After his release, Louis-Isaac devoted much of his time to revising his translation, and drafting the Commentairesthat he wanted to accompany each of the books of the Bible. In 1696, La Sainte Bible contenant l'Ancien et le Nouveau Testament (The Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testament) was published in 32 volumes. Some theologians criticized the translation of de Sacy as sometimes deviating from the letter of the original for no apparent reason. Others saw it as sober and elegant.
THE BELLES INFIDÈLES
A translation, goes the old adage, is like a woman – if the is beautiful, she is bound to be unfaithful. This image of the belles infidèles (the lovely unfaithful ones) coined by a French critic, Gilles de Ménage (1613–92) has recurred over the centuries in discourse about translation, but goes back long before de Ménage’s playful phrase. In her essay on ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’, Lori Chamberlain examines the emergence and use of the phrase from a feminist perspective. She points out that this effective sexualization of translation places both translation and woman in a subordinate position: in traditional marriage, only a wife could legally be charged with infidelity, hence the husband/original could never be guilty of that same crime, and the declares that ‘such an attitude betrays real anxiety about the problem of paternity and translation.
Chamberlain considers the use of figurative language about translation in statements by a range of writers and critics from the seventeenth-century Earl of Roscommon through to the modern critic George Steiner, concluding that the conventional hierarchy of superior original/lesser translation keeps recurring. She suggests that this is a perspective that arises from a distinction in value between production and reproduction, with originality/production being labelled as both more legitimate and more significant than translation/reproduction. This distinction she finds codified in academic discourse in general, noting that although the study of classics of world literature, of major philosophical writings and of writing by Third World postcolonial authors in American universities, are reliant on translations, nevertheless translation is still considered a more lowlyactivity than ‘original’ writing. She also points out that even those critics who attempt a more radical view of the relationship between original and translation, such as the Yale critic Harold Bloom and the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton still define translation in the same patriarchal terms. Since only a translation can be guilty of unfaithfulness, and given that translation is always benchmarked against the original from which it derives, it follows that the translation is always relegated to a position of inferiority. Chamberlain regards thinking about feminism and translation as still largely uncharted terrain, and like other North American feminist critics, turns to Derrida’s work as potentially enabling. Her view is that poststructuralist theory combined with feminist theory has served as a means towards encouraging a greater understanding of the implicit and explicit power relations involved in all translation. (Chamberlain, 2000 [1985]: 327).
19. Translation in Germany in the period of the Renaissance (Steinhöwel, von Eyb, and others).
ALBRECHT VON EYB (1420-1475). Poet and translator. Eyb is best known as one of the earliest of German humanists, becoming initially well known for his prose works in Latin. He later translated comedies of Plautus into Early New High German and adapted them to German audience expectations, situating them in German locales and giving characters German names. Far
more popular was his translation of Boccaccio's The Decameron, passages from which he used in completing his Ehebiichlein (Lillie Book on Marriage) in 1472. It became his most widely read work.
It was in renaissance period. During this period Albrecht von Eyb( Translator of Plautus’s works)and Heinrich Steinwel(translator of Aesop’s and Bocaccio’s works) were active in Germany. Albrecht ,In Italy, he was influenced by the culture of the Renaissance and the Humanism
Heinrich Steinhowel ("Steinhauel" or "Steinheil") was a Swabian author, humanist, and translator who was much inspired by the Italian Renaissance. His translations of medical treatises and fiction had a marked impact on Germans coming out of the Dark Ages.
Heinrich's fame comes, however, from translating a legendary biography description of the life of Aesop and Aesop's Fables which he put into a Latin-German encyclopedic version called "Ulmer Aesop" first published in Ulm in 1476.[4] In 1477-78 he published in Augsburg from Günther Zainer a large edition of Aesop's Fables with many woodcuts.[5] In 1480 he published a German translation of Aesop's Fables based on fables of Avians, Babrius, Romulus, and Alfred[6] which inspired other translations of later centuries in various languages worldwide.[7]
Heinrich also translated many works of Petrarch and Bocaccio. In 1473 he published a translated version of Bocaccio's De mulieribus claris printed by Johann Zainer in Ulm.[8] He also translated stories based on material of the works of Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini and Petrus Alphonsi.[6] His material was popular not only in Germany but in England, France, and the Netherlands. Heinrich was the center of a circle of German humanists.[9]
20. The Luther Bible and its significance. Luther’s influence on the emergence of the German language and national identity.
Certainly the greatest achievement of the Renaissance period in the realistic approach to conveying the source language works was the translation of the Bible into several West European national languages. The first to appear was the German Bible in Martin Luther's translation (1522-1534). This translation of the Book of Books was performed by Martin Luther contrary to the general tradition of the Middle Ages, i.e. not strictly word-for-word, but faithfully sense-to-sense. What was still more extraordinary for those times, was that Martin Luther resorted to an extensive employment in his translation of the Bible of spoken German. Moreover, the principles of translating the Bible in this way were officially defended by Luther himself in his published work (1540) On the Art of Translation (Von derKunst des Dolmetschen).
Martin Luther (/ˈluːθər/;[1] German:[ˈmaɐ̯tiːn ˈlʊtɐ] ( 
listen); 10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546) was a German professor of theology, composer, priest, monk[2] and a seminal figure in the Protestant Reformation.
Luther came to reject several teachings and practices of the Roman Catholic Church. He strongly disputed the claim that freedom from God's punishment for sin could be purchased with money, proposing an academic discussion of the practice and efficacy of indulgences in his Ninety-five Theses of 1517. His refusal to renounce all of his writings at the demand of Pope Leo X in 1520 and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521 resulted in his excommunication by the Pope and condemnation as an outlaw by the Emperor.
His translation of the Bible into the vernacular (instead of Latin) made it more accessible to the laity, an event that had a tremendous impact on both the church and German culture. It fostered the development of a standard version of the German language, added several principles to the art of translation,[5] and influenced the writing of an English translation, the Tyndale Bible.[6] His hymns influenced the development of singing in Protestant churches.[7]