NOT A REAL TRANSLATION, BUT A ‘REMAKE’. NOTES ON THE ENGLISH VERSION OF INCREMENTORUM ET DECREMETORUM AULAE OTHMANNICAE … LIBRI TRES
NOT A REAL TRANSLATION, BUT A ‘REMAKE’. NOTES ON THE ENGLISH VERSION OF INCREMENTORUM ET DECREMETORUM AULAE OTHMANNICAE … LIBRI TRES

Summary/Abstract: The present paper is aimed at testing Virgil Cândea’s hypothesis concerning the fate of Dimitrie Cantemir’s most famous work, The History of the Othman Empire, first written in Latin and translated into English and hence into other vernaculars. A few years after he discovered the Latin original, Cândea stated that the English version was not a real translation, but “a sort of remake”, holding the translator responsible for a great deal of the “harsh criticism” received by the book. My tools for testing this hypothesis are drawn from relevance theory, formulated by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson and adjusted to translation studies by Ernst-August Gutt. In section 1 I summarize the problem investigated, presenting the history of the text and Cândea’s arguments. Section 2 is reserved to the definition of the main concepts used in the analysis. In section 3, Cândea’s hypothesis is rejected and the analysis of a few examples illustrates how the quest for relevance drives translation techniques.

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