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Ancient Translational Style: What Can Stylometry tell us. Matthew Munson GCDH and DARIAH Twitter : @ sonofmun Email: mmunson@gcdh.de. The Questions. How much of the New Testament did St. Jerome translate into Latin?
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AncientTranslational Style: What Can Stylometrytellus Matthew Munson GCDH and DARIAH Twitter: @sonofmun Email: mmunson@gcdh.de
The Questions • How much of the New Testament did St. Jerome translate into Latin? • Can Stylometry show us whether Jerome or Rufinus was a truer translator of Origen of Alexandria?
St. Jerome and the Vulgate • ~340 AD – 420 AD • Latin Vulgate translation • Pope Damasus 383 • Finished “revision” of Gospels 384 • Translated the Psalter and several other books from Greek • Translated the whole OT from Hebrew (finished 406) • But what about Acts-Revelation in the NT? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/Antonio_da_Fabriano_II_-_Saint_Jerome_in_His_Study_-_Walters_37439.jpg
The Stylistic Problem • Question: • Can we determine whether Jerome translated the rest of the NT using stylometry? • Data: • Latin texts of the Vulgate including the Psalter translated both from Greek and from Hebrew • Method: • Used the stylo script for R-Statistics from Maciej Eder and Jan Rybicki
The Translation of Origen of Alexandria • Origen – 184 AD – 253 AD • Most important Christian theologian before Augustine • Was anathematized in 6th century, works destroyed • Latin translations of St. Jerome and Rufinus of Aquileia very important http://sophiainstitutenyc.org/?s=origen+teaching+the+saints
The Stylistic Problem • Question: • Can we determine whether Jerome or Rufinus was a more exact translator of Origen using stylometry? • Data: • Gathered as many original and translated Origenic texts from the two authors as possible (24 from Jerome, 11 from Rufinus) • Method: • Again used the stylo script for R-Statistics from Maciej Eder and Jan Rybicki
Where do I go from here? • Jerome NT: • Compare decisive words (Eder-Rybicki Zeta) • I expect it is simply genre, not translator style • Jerome vs. Rufinus • Compare Jerome’s and Rufinus’ translations to Origen’s originals • Need to compare Greek to Latin • We have very few texts that exist in both Greek and Latin, so not a comparison of translations but of style