A dialectal reading of the History of Translation

2013

The translation of dialect is one of the most difficult and yet interesting challenges facing literary translators. Although theoretical contributions about dialect translation develop mainly from 1960, this article proposes a historical reading of the history of translation from antiquity to the first half of the 20th century, inquiring about the “implications” that the milestones of translation might have had on the translation of dialect. Since dialect texts are conceived within a political hierarchy of language, a parallelism is established between ‘dialect-standard’ and ‘vernacular language-dominant language’. The emergence of terms and practices relevant for dialect translation (forei…