Repository path: wiki/base/sources/S-schleiermacher-methoden.md · rendered 2026-09-09

Tier 2 source — Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersezens (1813)

The project's first Tier 2 source read in the original, and the first non-Anglophone one (charter §4, amendment A2; wiki/program.md Slate F, German row). It is also the source behind the project's principal existing frame: S-venuti-invisibility names this lecture as Venuti's antecedent and transmits one sentence of it. This page is the result of going to the text.

Identity — full citation

• Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834), "Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersezens." Lecture read to the Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 24 June 1813. First printed in Friedrich Schleiermacher's sämmtliche Werke, Dritte Abtheilung: Zur Philosophie, Bd. 2 (Berlin: Reimer, 1838), pp. 207–245.
• Edition consulted: the text as reprinted in Hans Joachim Störig (ed.), Das Problem des Übersetzens (Stuttgart: Henry Goverts, 1963), whose page numbers [38]–[70] appear in brackets in the file used.
• Schleiermacher's own spelling is retained throughout (Uebersezen, Thatsache, ausdrükken, Geistesentwikkelung).

Provenance & access route

PDF of the Störig reprint hosted at sites.unimi.it/dililefi/costazza/programmi/2006-07/Schleiermacher.pdf (Università degli Studi di Milano, course materials), fetched by direct HTTPS GET 2026-07-25. The PDF carries a real text layer (not an image scan); text was extracted locally and cleaned. The complete essay was read — approximately 77,000 characters of German.

Ledger row in wiki/base/consulted.md (the Störig edition is in copyright even though Schleiermacher's text is not; only the 1813 text is used or stored).

Copyright status & excerpting discipline

Schleiermacher's text is public domain (author d. 1834). Störig's 1963 anthology is a copyrighted compilation; nothing of Störig's — introduction, notes, apparatus — is retained beyond his bracketed page numbers, which are used as a citation aid. Four passages of the 1813 text (~7,200 characters) are stored in the repository at workshop/translations/schleiermacher-methoden/R04-v1/source-de-passages.txt; the essay is not stored whole.

Language read

German, the original, complete. No English rendering of this essay was fetched or opened at any point. The project is not relying on an English summary for anything on this page. One qualification, recorded because it is the honest state: the lead's priors contain the standard English translation-studies account of this essay, and S-venuti-invisibility — read earlier in the same session — already carried an English paraphrase of its most famous sentence. See T-schleiermacher-methoden-R04-v1, which declares contamination: high for that reason.

Translation limb

Four passages were translated into English by the lead as a first-class artifact, from the source alone, with a translator's log frozen and committed to git before this page was written: workshop/translations/schleiermacher-methoden/R04-v1/translation.md (T-schleiermacher-methoden-R04-v1). The passages are cited below as A, B, C, D.

Summary in the project's own words

The essay's shape. Schleiermacher opens by observing how far the phenomenon of translation extends (A), narrows his object twice (B), then argues that for the object so narrowed there are exactly two methods and no third (C), spends the bulk of the lecture on the difficulties of the first, and states the conditions under which it is possible at all (D).

A — translation is everywhere, including inside one language. Before any of the famous material, Schleiermacher lists the range: between people separated by the diameter of the earth; between a living language and one dead for centuries; between the dialects of one people and between the different centuries of one language, which he says are "already, in a narrower sense, different languages" and "not seldom require a full interpreting between one another"; between contemporaries of different classes; between two people of different temperament using the same words; and — the case he presses hardest — between oneself and one's own past utterances: "we must sometimes translate our own past speeches after a time, if we want to make them properly our own again."

B — and then he sets most of that aside, twice. First he excludes intralingual translation from the inquiry, on an explicit ground: it is "more or less a momentary need of the heart", "too much confined to the moment to require any guidance other than that of feeling", and if rules were given for it they could only be rules for keeping oneself in a morally open frame of mind. Second, within interlingual translation he separates the interpreter (Dolmetscher), whose office is business, from the translator proper (Uebersetzer), whose office is science and art — conceding at once that this is not the ordinary oral/written distinction and asking pardon for the usage.

The criterion that separates them is not genre but a gradient in the source: "The less the author himself came forward in the original writing, the more he acted merely as an organ apprehending the object and followed the order of space and of time, the more the carrying-over is a matter of mere interpreting… The more, on the contrary, the author's own peculiar way of seeing and of connecting has prevailed in the presentation… the more his work already passes over into the higher domain of art." Newspaper articles and ordinary travel writing sit near the interpreter's end, and Schleiermacher says it becomes ridiculous when their translator claims to have proceeded as an artist.

C — the two methods. "Either the translator leaves the writer in peace as far as possible and moves the reader toward him; or he leaves the reader in peace as far as possible and moves the writer toward him." Two things in the immediate context are worth having, because the sentence usually travels without them. (i) The two are not a spectrum to be balanced: one or the other "must be pursued as strictly as possible", and any mixing yields "a thoroughly unreliable result" in which "writer and reader will miss one another altogether." (ii) Each method is given an explicit and different standard of completion — the first is perfect if one can say the author, had he learned German as well as the translator learned Latin, would have translated his own work no differently; the second, if one could assert that had the German readership been transformed into connoisseurs and contemporaries of the author, the original would have become for them what the translation is for them now. Schleiermacher notes that the second is what people mean by the formula translate an author as he would have written in German.

D — the conditions. After conceding at length the imperfections of the first method, he states that it "rests on two conditions: that the understanding of foreign works be a familiar and a wished-for state; and that the domestic language itself be conceded a certain pliancy (Biegsamkeit)." Where these hold, translation of that kind "becomes a natural phenomenon" and "takes hold in the whole development of the mind."

What this grounds — and what it does not

Grounds (Tier 2 — claims about the discourse, not about what reads well):

1. That the project's principal frame is a lossy transmission of this text, in three specific ways. S-venuti-invisibility records the domestication/foreignization pair and attributes it here. Reading C in context adds: the anti-mixing rule (Schleiermacher forbids what a modern reader naturally hears as a dial), the two distinct completion standards, and the fact that the choice is presented as a problem of method with a stated object, not as an ethics of the foreign. Reading D adds a condition of possibility the transmission drops entirely.
2. A named condition on the availability of a method (D), which is the German contribution to TH-20260725-capability-conditions. Condition (ii) is a capability claim about the receiving language; condition (i) is about readership appetite, not capability, and this page does not merge them.
3. A source-side criterion for what needs translating at all (B): the author's own peculiar way of seeing and of connecting. It is a gradient, and it is the same variable the project's voice sense names — but named on the source side, and used to decide the object rather than to score the outcome. With Futabatei's 詩想 (S-futabatei-honyaku-hyojun) this is one of two independent traditions putting a source-side property in the pivotal role; the typology has no id for it. Proposed as D-20260725-05.
4. That the discipline's founding text names intralingual translation and then declines to theorise it (A then B) — which is the direct Tier 2 context for the project's A-yosano-yomogiu and A-beowulf-ingeld. See the confrontation below.

Does not ground:

• Anything about what reads well. Tier 2 informs the typology and grounds claims about practice and reception; it does not outrank Tier 1 (wiki/base/sources/README.md).
• Any recommendation. Schleiermacher argues for the first method; the project does not adopt his preference any more than it adopts Venuti's.
• Reception of this essay. No secondary literature on Schleiermacher was read. This page reports what the text says, not what the tradition has made of it — with the single exception of the comparison to S-venuti-invisibility, which is a comparison to the project's own page, not to Venuti's book (which that page records as never opened).

The confrontation the project can actually run

Schleiermacher excludes intralingual translation because it is a momentary affair of feeling for which no rules can be given beyond moral openness (B). The project has since built two intralingual anchors and they do not behave that way:

• A-beowulf-ingeld — ten culture-bound items in 56 lines, all four translators forced to decide on all ten; reflex acceptance 0/12 at total semantic drift against 19/40 at partial, with a within-root control (glæd taken by three of four translators, gladiað eleven lines later by none). That is a regularity, measured, with a mechanism.
• A-yosano-yomogiu — two translators of one language diverging systematically where free copy was available to both (five substitution sites against one).

The evidence is against the exclusion, and the project's own evidence is what is against it: intralingual translation exhibits stable, describable, translator-differentiating behaviour, which is what "rules can be given" means in any sense the project uses. Two hedges kept: Schleiermacher's own examples are conversational (understanding a friend of different temper, re-reading one's own words), which is a narrower case than a 1,000-year diachronic pair and may genuinely be governed by feeling alone; and the exclusion is programmatic — he is scoping a lecture, not asserting a finding. Recorded as a partial refutation of a scoping claim, not of a result. internal-judgment-only on the reading of Schleiermacher's motive; the anchor numbers themselves are anchored.

The other half is friendlier: A licenses the project's intralingual programme in advance, three paragraphs before B declines it, and licenses it on exactly the project's grounds — that different centuries of one language are already different languages in a narrower sense.

Open items

• The […] in passage B covers ~1,100 characters (the writing/orality argument) that were not translated. Not a gap in the reading — the whole essay was read — but a gap in the artifact.
• Schleiermacher's long middle section on the difficulties of the first method (Störig [48]–[58]) was read but is not summarised here; it is where his discussion of what the translator's own language must undergo lives, and D is its conclusion. A second pass could mine it for the target-language-capability claim in more detail than TH-20260725-capability-conditions currently rests on.
• Benjamin (1923), Goethe's three modes, and Humboldt's Agamemnon preface (1816) remain unread; the German row of Slate F is opened, not closed.

Second-reader verification — 2026-07-25 (S022)

E-20260725-slatef-verification, mandated by the D-20260725-05 ratification vote. google/gemini-3.6-flash, blind: given the German and the lead's English with the translator's log stripped, asked questions naming no sense and no proposal.

TRANSLATION-ASSESSMENT: SOUND — "remarkably accurate, precise, and faithful… No material omissions, unwarranted additions, or foreclosed alternative readings were identified." Biegsamkeit → "pliancy" was specifically approved for preserving the metaphor "without prematurely tying it to modern linguistic terms like 'plasticity' or 'malleability'" — the term the reading leans on, checked for exactly the foreclosure that would have undermined it.

The two readings this page grounds were confirmed, unprompted. Asked where the property deciding translation proper from mere interpreting resides — offering source/author, target language, reader, translator, or elsewhere — the reader answered "the source text / author", quoting „Je mehr hingegen des Verfassers eigenthümliche Art zu sehen und zu verbinden in der Darstellung vorgewaltet hat…" against „Je weniger in der Urschrift der Verfasser selbst heraustrat… desto mehr kommt es… auf ein bloßes Dolmetschen an". Asked whether the receiving language's capacity is fixed or changeable, it answered changeable, by concession of the linguistic community („daß der heimischen Sprache selbst eine gewiße Biegsamkeit zugestanden werde"; „greift ein in die gesammte Geistesentwikkelung").

This is the evidence on which voice gained a source-side pole (D-20260725-05 Q2, ratified).