Browsing by Author "Lis, Kinga"
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Item On the earliest English translation of the "Laws of Oléron" and its editions(2020) Lis, KingaThe Laws of Oléron are a compilation of regulations binding in north-western Europe. They concern relationships on board a ship and in ports, as well as between members of one crew and those of another when it comes to safe journey. Even though the “code” was known in England at the beginning of the 14th century, it was only in the 16th century that it was translated from French into (Early Modern) English. The literature on the topic mentions two independent 16th-century renditions of the originally French text (Lois d’Oléron) but disagrees as to the authorship of the earliest translation, its date and place of creation, the mutual relationship between the two, their content and respective source texts. Strikingly, three names appear in this context: Thomas Petyt, Robert Copland, and W. Copland. The picture emerging from various accounts concerning the translations is very confusing. It is the purpose of this paper to trace the history of the misconceptions surrounding the Early Modern English versions of the Laws of Oléron, and to illustrate how, by approaching them from a broader perspective, two hundred years of confusion can be resolved. The wider context adopted in this study is that of a book as a whole, and not of an individual text within the book, set against the backdrop of the printing milieu. The investigation begins with a brief inquiry into the lives and careers of the three people named with respect to the two renditions, in an attempt to determine whether these provide any grounds for disagreement. The analysis also juxtaposes the relevant renditions as far as their contents, layout, and the actual texts are concerned in order to establish what the relationship between them is and whether it could account for the confusion surrounding the translations.Item Richard Rolle’s Psalter rendition: The work of a language purist?(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2015) Lis, KingaRichard Rolle’s Psalter rendition, as any of the medieval English Psalter translations, is thickly enveloped in a set of assertions, originating in the nineteenth century, whose validity has been accepted unquestioned. It is the purpose of the present paper to investigate one such claim concerning the vocabulary selection, according to which Rolle’s rendition would employ almost exclusively lexical items of native origin, except for the instances where no proper item with native etymology presents itself in a particular context and Rolle is forced to use a Latin-derived word. The assertion generates at least two problematic issues. Firstly, it identifies Rolle’s translation as most exceptional in relation to the remaining 14th-century English Psalter translations: the Wycliffite Bibles and the Middle English Glossed Prose Psalter of which the former are asserted to be overtly influenced by the Latin text they render and the latter deeply indebted both syntactically and, more importantly, lexically to a ‘French source’. Secondly, it ascribes Richard Rolle the ideas nowadays covered by the term linguistic purism. Therefore, it seems necessary to analyse the lexical layer of the text in search of evidence, or lack thereof, which sets Rolle’s translation lexically apart from other renditions and sheds some light on the issue of Rolle’s supposed linguistic purism. Such a study is conducted on the basis of the nominal layer of the first fifty Psalms of the four relevant texts analysed in relation to their common Latin source text as only the juxtaposition of all of these enables one to (dis)prove the claim cited above. To provide a wider context from which to view them, the findings will be presented in relation to an overview of the contemporary theory of translation and set against a broadly sketched linguistic map of contemporary England.