ABSTRACT
The author describes three particular issues that the translation of such a book poses – problems of Polish-English equivalence, the problem of Latin and its role in the political discourse of the centuries in question, and the conundrum of translating historical language – as well as the approaches adopted to resolving them. On the first point, it is noted that while Polish and English speakers do share, to a considerable degree, the common European cultural heritage, not surprisingly the two languages quite often fail to offer straightforward equivalents, even for core concepts. A second challenging aspect of translating the kind of political discourse lies in the fundamentally polylingual nature of that discourse, all the fact that political writings and speeches were very often produced in a mixture of Polish and Latin. A third important issue is that the very fabric of the somewhat archaic Polish is quite challenging to translate.
