Speaking with Antiquity. Towards a model for the translation of ancient texts

Every translation task raises a slew of complex methodological issues (Ballard 2009, Ost 2009). For ancient languages, these questions are even more outstanding due to the time lag; this is why we consider their discrete exploration to be crucial. This paper thus aims to identify the specificities of translation from ancient languages into modern languages, to define the particular challenges arising and to suggest theoretical and methodological leads to tackle them. We assume the specificities of the ancient languages’ translation (ALT from hereon) on two levels. The first one is linguistic (lexical, syntactic, grammatical, textual). Ancient texts are rarely established with certainty (cf. critical apparatus). Moreover, unlike modern languages that have reciprocal influences, Latin – while remaining one of the main resources for neologisms – does not change due to foreign language and translation influences. Even if the contemporary production of Latin texts is unequivocally limited, multiple translations and retranslations have led to a broad intertextual set (Darbellay 2005), within which every new translation has to find its place. The second level is extralinguistic (pragmatic, sociolinguistic, cultural). Every translation recreates a communication situation (Pergnier 1993). In this sense, we propose to analyze the ALT process in light of sociolinguistic theories (Fishman 1965, Labov 1972, Blanchet 2000), in particular, communication ethnography and of Hymes’ SPEAKING model (1972). We intend to explore how the characteristics of the original communication situation and those of the situation recreated by the translation can be considered to determine a translation strategy (House 1997, 2006). The impact of the two ALT specificities will be evaluated by means of their correlation in order to illustrate how they influence each other respectively. Our analysis provides new theoretical and methodological considerations in ALT