Chapter 16. Latin/Romance tradition

The history of translation in Latin or Romance Europe is steered by three major driving forces. First, the transfer of cultural goods, e.g. between Greece and Rome, makes use of a broad set of writing techniques that include but also exceed what is labelled translation proper from the first centuries on. Second, transfer is not only aimed at giving access to foreign sources in all domains of public and private discourse, but is also used in the process of building independent (later: national) repertoires of the target culture, such as literary genres or models of learning language. Finally, the thinking about translation is embedded within several intellectual traditions: the early grammatical and rhetorical tradition is from the third century on paralleled by a patristic one that gives a more prominent place to meaning and approaches translation from a philosophical and religious viewpoint.