Traductibilitatea vs. intraductibilitatea surselor greco-bizantine ale textelor normative din Moldova și Țara Românească (sec. al XVII-lea)
The Greek-Byzantine Sources’ Translatability vs. Untranslatability of the 17th Century legal Texts in Moldavia and Wallachia

Summary/Abstract: The legal translation, seen as a “category of translation in its own right” (Weston 1992: 2, Gémar 1995: 143, Garzone 2000: 395), “combining the inventiveness of literary translation with the terminological precision of technical translation” (Cairns, McKeon, 1995: 191), has a special place among the non-literary translations and it aims to achieve both semantic and functional equivalence. As phenomenon and process, translation broadly means the disposal of two linguistic systems belonging to different cultures in a bargaining power with the source language in a dominant position towards the target language. This bargaining power, granted by the unidirectional cultural transfer, is overwhelming and generates a number of „imbalances” that can be observed at lexical level if the source language represents the expression of a superior culture, as prestige and seniority, as is the case of the Greek-Byzantine one over the language and culture of the 17th century’s Moldavia and Wallachia. The orientation of Vasile Lupu (Moldavia, 1634 – 1653) and Matei Basarab (Wallachia, 1632–1654), rulers and issuers of the here concerned normative texts (Carte românească de învățătură [Romanian Book of Learning], 1646, Îndreptarea legii [The Law’s Rectification], 1652) towards the Greek-Byzantine legal system, beyond the religious identity and the geographical proximity, was driven by the awareness of the need for the legal system’s emancipation in the Romanian principalities. This article, without aiming for the status of an exhaustive analysis, seeks to underline and analyse several translation cases classified in two categories, one for the translatability cases and one for the untranslatability ones, having the purpose to reveal the linguistic and legal culture realities as they were back in the 17th century. For a better classification I placed these two dimensions into a dichotomy inside of which they do not exclude but highlight each other. If the translatability cases easily can be observed as per form and at morphological and syntactical level, the cases that fall within the untranslatability are by far the most interesting study cases. “Subject to numerous linguistic and conceptual pressures” (Gafton 2012: 69), the translator possess several tools with help of which he provides the receiver a functional text: the loan words’ integration, the conceptual compensation, the lexical compensation (loan translations or calques), and not infrequently the intentional loss of some cultural elements, alien to the local realities. However, regardless of the adopted translation solution, it is obvious that the scholars’ aim to achieve functional and semantic equivalence for their translation product (metafrasma) was undoubtedly met.

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