Early Modern Cultures of Translation in Wales

Innovations and Continuities

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The aim of this project is the systematic and text-based interpretation and contextualization of the culture(s) of translation in Wales in the long sixteenth century. Referring to a scale that has innovations at one end and continuities at the other, the project will explore the cultural importance of translations in Early Modern Wales and the characteristics of the contemporary culture(s) of translation and its differences compared to medieval culture(s) of translation. It will profile the regional specifics of translations into Welsh as well as their global interconnections with Protestantism, the Counter-Reformation, and Humanism. Methodologically, the project is indebted to a programme in translation studies which privileges the hermeneutic, pragmatic, and functional character of translations from the perspective of the receiving textual culture and which bases its interrogation of texts on fine-grained linguistic and stylistic analyses.

The following four interrelated subprojects will provide meaningful answers to the research questions outlined above:

1. A comprehensive investigation of the Welsh translation of Juan Luis Vives’ De institutione feminae Christianae, a tract on the gender-specific education of young girls.
2. An analysis of translations of catechisms into Welsh.
3. A study of the style of Early Modern Welsh translations with special reference to their syntactic complexity.
4. An examination of the Early Modern reception and adaptation of texts which had already been translated into Welsh in the Middle Ages.

The principal researchers are Professor Elena Parina (Section for Celtic Studies at the University of Bonn) and Professor Erich Poppe (department of Comparative Linguistics and Celtic Studies at the University of Marburg). Dr Dagmar Bronner (Bonn) and Raphael Sackmann (Marburg) are also working on the project as research assistants.

• Project website at the University of Marburg.
• Project presentation of phase I

Publications (project-related):

• Prof Dr Elena Parina
• Prof Dr Erich Poppe