ABSTRACT

Roman approaches, which involved assimila­ tion of the source text to the target culture and which were criticized by Nietzsche as we have seen, are not unique in the history of transla­ tion. Similar attitudes towards the source text as something which needs to be adapted to the receiving culture existed in the Middle Ages. Amos ( 1 920: 5) quotes the words of JElfric to the effect that in his translation of the Lives of the Saints he abbreviated the words but not the sense in order to prevent boredom. In doing so, he was making a double ideological move: he was not only adapting his translations to his readership rather than respecting the source text, but was also practising a craft that the educated and clerical classes frowned upon, since translation was then seen as something of a revolutionary act, an attempt to replace the dominant Latin by emergent national langu­ ages struggling to assert themselves and to wrest the dissemination of knowledge from class control. In this sense, JElfric was empowering his readers in two ways through translation: he was putting information into their hands for unmediated consumption, and he was allowing their reading habits to control his choice of translation technique.