Simono Daukanto Rubinaitis Peliūzė : vertimas ir adaptavimas

Abstract

The article analyzes the strategies of one translation (Rubinaitis Peliūzė; DaRub) by Simonas Daukantas. While translating Robinson der Jüngere by Joachim Heinrich Campe Daukantas adapted the original to his own culture: he changed most of the proper names (e.g. Hamburg became Palanga, Gotlieb―Pile etc.), domesticated some of the cultural characteristics, such as the religion of the main protagonist (e.g. in the original Robinson is a Protestant, in DaRub―a Catholic), language, and a few historical events. However, since some proper names were kept in the original, or they were changed to different ones further on in the text, I believe that Daukantas was translating sentence by sentence and did not revise or compare his finished work again with the original. Daukantas tried to avoid literal translation. He modified sentences by shortening or extending them. However, he followed the original quite precisely. The tendency to etymologize some words (e.g. slėgti) were conspicuous. The usage of the Prussian and Latvian words in the DaRub corresponds well to Daukantas’s idea to create the Standard Lithuanian language based on historical principles. Daukantas domesticated the text not only on the semantic level, but on the pragmatic as well (e.g. instead of neutral verbs he often used connotative ones). Syntactic meanings of the text were not kept in translation due to different Lithuanian and German sentence structure. Some of the mistakes found in DaRub could be attributed to the anonymous person who rewrote (copied) the text, rather than to Daukantas, since his original longhand version did not survive.