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Early Modern Cultures of Translation in Wales: Innovations and Continuities

Photo: courtesy of the National Library of Wales
Welsh translation of Juan Luis Vives' De institutione feminae Christianae

The research project is part of the Priority Programme ‘Early Modern Translation Cultures (1450-1800)’ (SPP 2130) of the German Research Foundation (DFG) with duration of thirty-six months (begun 1 / 10 /2021). It continues the research of the project ‘The Welsh Contribution to the Early Modern Cultures of Translation: 16th Century Strategies of Translating into Welsh’ in the priority programme’s first phase (2018-2021).

The aim of this project in its second phase of funding 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 mediaeval 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.

Cooperation partners are Dr. Marieke Meelen (Cambridge) and Prof. David Willis (Oxford).

Website of the Priority Programme: https://www.spp2130.de/index.php/en/welcome/