ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the medieval and Renaissance ways of practicing translation in order to challenge a related assumption: the idea that the translation text has always been conceptualized as a single, autonomous version. It argues that, in context of early modern Europe's political centralization processes, and in the context of ideologies of linguistic unification that accompanied these processes, Renaissance translators struggled to accommodate their definitions of translation to a monolingual text-model. The chapter analyzes a representative example of the frequent use that Renaissance translators made of synonymia, to argue that, even when the synonyms belonged to the same language, they could be seen as yet another way of combining different versions inside the same text. It surveys different genres in which multilingual translation was used, that it is possible to imagine a multiplicity of reading positions in these genres, too. The chapter discusses one last example of translation practices that have been excluded from the history and theory of translation.
