Repository path: workshop/translations/schleiermacher-methoden/R04-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

Schleiermacher, On the Different Methods of Translating (1813) — four passages

Contamination: high. Passage C contains what is probably the single most-quoted sentence in Anglophone translation studies, and the project's own wiki/base/sources/S-venuti-invisibility.md — read this session, before translating — paraphrases it in English as "either move the reader toward the author, or move the author toward the reader." Published English renderings of this essay (Lefevere; Bernofsky) plausibly sit in the lead's training data. No published rendering was fetched or opened, but independence cannot be claimed for Passage C and is doubtful for the essay's famous vocabulary generally. Passages A, B and D are much less quoted in English and the claim is correspondingly weaker there, but it is still not none.

A. The opening — that translation happens everywhere, including inside one language

[38] The fact that a speech is carried over out of one language into another meets us everywhere, and in the most manifold shapes. If on the one hand it can bring into contact people who were originally separated, it may be, by the diameter of the earth; if into one language there can be taken up the products of another that has been dead these many centuries — then on the other hand we need not go outside the territory of a single language to encounter the same phenomenon. For it is not only that the dialects of a people's different tribes, and the different developments of the same language or dialect in different centuries, are already, in a narrower sense, different languages, and not seldom require a full interpreting between one another; even contemporaries — not divided by dialect, merely drawn from different classes of the people, who having little social connection diverge widely in their formation — can often understand one another only through a similar mediation. Indeed, are we not frequently obliged first to translate for ourselves the speech of another who is entirely our equal but of a different cast of mind and temper? When, that is, we feel that the same words in our own mouth would have quite another sense, or at least a stronger content here and a weaker one there, than they have in his; and that if we wanted to express the same thing he means, we should after our own manner make use of quite other words and turns of phrase — then, as we [39] determine this feeling more closely and it becomes a thought to us, it appears that we are translating. Indeed we must sometimes translate our own past speeches after a time, if we want to make them properly our own again.

And this facility is practised not only in order to transplant into foreign soil what a language has brought forth in the domain of the sciences and the arts of speech, and thereby to enlarge the sphere of action of these products of the mind; it is practised also in the commercial dealings of private persons of different nations, and in the diplomatic dealings of independent governments with one another, each of which is accustomed to address the other only in its own language, when — without making use of a dead language — they mean to hold strictly to equality.

B. Setting intralingual translation aside; the interpreter and the translator proper

But naturally we do not mean to draw into our present consideration everything that lies within this wide compass. That necessity of translating even within one's own language and dialect — more or less a momentary need of the heart — is likewise, in its effect, too much confined to the moment to require any guidance other than that of feeling; and if rules were to be given for it, they could only be those by following which a person maintains himself in a purely moral frame of mind, so that his sense stays open to what is less akin to him.

If we now separate this off, and stay for the present with the carrying-over out of a foreign language into our own, then here too we shall be able to distinguish two different domains — not, to be sure, with full precision, since that seldom succeeds, but only with blurred borders, and yet clearly enough if one looks to the end-points. The interpreter, namely, discharges his office in the domain of business life; the translator proper, chiefly in the domain of science and art.

[…]

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. Thus the translator of newspaper articles and ordinary travel descriptions attaches himself most nearly to the interpreter, and it can become ridiculous if his work makes greater claims and he wants to be regarded as having proceeded like an artist. The more, on the contrary, the author's own peculiar way of seeing and of connecting has prevailed in the presentation, the more he has followed some order freely chosen or determined by the impression, the more his work already passes over into the higher domain of art — and the translator too must then bring other powers and other skills to his work, and be acquainted with his author and with that author's language in another sense than the interpreter is.

C. The two methods

But now the translator proper, who wants really to bring together these two entirely separated persons, his author and his reader, and to help the latter — without however compelling him out of the circle of his mother tongue — to as correct and complete an understanding and enjoyment of the former as may be: what ways can he take to this end? In my view there are only two. 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. The two are so entirely different from one another that one or the other of them must be pursued as strictly as possible, whereas from any mixing of them a thoroughly unreliable result necessarily follows, and it is to be feared that writer and reader will miss one another altogether.

The difference between the two methods, and that this is their relation to one another, must be immediately evident. For in the first case the translator takes pains to replace by his work the understanding [48] of the original language which the reader lacks. The very image, the very impression which he himself has gained of the work as it is, through his knowledge of the original language, he seeks to communicate to his readers, and so to move them to his own standpoint, which is properly foreign to them. But if the translation means to let its Roman author, for example, speak as he would have spoken and written had he been a German among Germans, then it does not merely move the author, in like manner, as far as the translator's standpoint — for even to the translator he speaks not German but Roman — rather it shifts him directly into the world of German readers and transforms him into one of their own; and this precisely is the other case.

The first translation will be perfect in its kind if one can say: had the author learned German as well as the translator has learned Roman, he would have translated his originally Roman-composed work no otherwise than the translator has actually done. But the other, since it shows the writer not as he would himself have translated, but as he would originally have written in German had he been a German, can hardly have any other standard of completion than this — that one could give the assurance that if the German readers as a body could be transformed into connoisseurs and contemporaries of the author, the work itself would have become for them exactly what the translation is for them now, when the author has been transformed into a German. This method is plainly what all those have in view who make use of the formula that one ought to translate an author as he would himself have written in German.

D. The two conditions on which the first method rests

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. Where these are given, translating of this kind becomes a natural phenomenon, takes hold in the whole development of the mind, and, as it acquires a determinate value, it also affords a sure enjoyment.

Translator's log

Written at translation time, 2026-07-25, and frozen before any evaluation of this translation was designed and before any source page, theory page or synthesis was written. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims (charter §3, A4).

Source handling

1. The text is an OCR of a 1963 reprint and carries artifacts. Four were identified and normalised before translating, each logged here so the normalisation is checkable against source-de-passages.txt, which is stored un-normalised: line-break word splits (entfer nt → entfernt; ver steht → versteht; gehörig en → gehörigen); stray footnote-reference digits sitting inside sentences (einander zuführen, 5 und dem lezten; kommt es bei 2 der Uebertragung; Vollendung 10 der Sprache) — read as reference marks and dropped; em-dashes lost by the extractor, surviving as double spaces (zwei verschiedene Gebiete freilich nicht … deutlich genug unterscheiden) — restored as dashes on the reading that they are a parenthesis, which the syntax forces; and Störig's bracketed page numbers, kept.
2. Spelling was not modernised in the source file. Schleiermacher writes Uebersezen, Thatsache, ausdrükken, Geistesentwikkelung. Nothing in the argument turns on it, but it is left standing because it is one of the few marks of period the source carries and the translation cannot reproduce.
3. Passage B is not continuous. The bracketed […] covers roughly 1,100 characters in which Schleiermacher argues that writing belongs to art and science while speech belongs to business, and that this is why his terminology is not the ordinary oral/written one. It was omitted for length, not because it is inconvenient; the omission is marked in the text rather than left silent.

Decisions

4. Dolmetscher / Uebersetzer → "interpreter" / "translator proper". This is the one place where the standard English pair carries the same friction as the German. Schleiermacher explicitly concedes his usage is not the ordinary one — ordinarily Dolmetschen means the oral kind and Uebersetzen the written kind — and he asks pardon for it. English "interpreter/translator" splits on exactly the same axis and is wrong in exactly the same way, so the reader of the translation meets the same objection at the same point and is given the same answer. Live alternative rejected: transliterating (Dolmetscher italicised), which would have made the seam visible but would have hidden that English readers already have the same wrong intuition to overcome.
5. Rede → "speech". Rede is the essay's basic unit and covers written and spoken alike; the passage that turns on that coverage is the one omitted at 3. English "speech" tilts toward the oral and toward oration, which is a loss. "Discourse" was live and rejected as a twentieth-century technical term that would import a theory the 1813 text does not have; "utterance" likewise. "Text" was rejected outright — it would make nonsense of "are we not obliged first to translate the speech of another" and of "our own past speeches".
6. Bildung → "formation". The passage on class ("who having little social connection diverge widely in their formation") is about upbringing, cultivation, and education at once. "Education" narrows it to schooling, "culture" reads as anthropology, "breeding" imports class comedy the German does not have. "Formation" is a calque and reads slightly foreign; that was accepted.
7. Gemüth → "heart"; Stimmung → "frame of mind"; sittlich → "moral". In B, ein augenblikkliches Bedürfniß des Gemüthes is the hinge of the sentence that dismisses intralingual translation, and Gemüth is neither "mind" nor "soul" nor "heart" in English but a word for the feeling part of the person. "Heart" was chosen for legibility, knowing it loses the cognitive half. Flagged because the argument of the sentence depends on the faculty named: what Schleiermacher assigns intralingual translation to is feeling, and what he says it therefore does not need is rules.
8. Biegsamkeit → "pliancy". Passage D is short and everything in it hangs on this word. "Flexibility" is the ordinary modern equivalent and was rejected as too abstract and too managerial; "suppleness" and "bendability" were live. "Pliancy" keeps the physical metaphor of biegen, to bend, which the argument needs — the claim is that the receiving language must be permitted to be bent out of its own shape. zugestanden werde → "be conceded", passive and grudging, kept passive: it is not the translator who bends the language, it is the language's owners who allow it.
9. eigenthümliche Art zu sehen und zu verbinden → "own peculiar way of seeing and of connecting". Resisted the smoother "distinctive manner of perceiving and combining." Eigenthümlich is "peculiar-to-him", not "distinguished", and the criterion Schleiermacher is stating is proprietary, not evaluative. "Connecting" kept bare rather than resolved to "composing" or "associating" — the German does not say which, and which it is happens to matter.
10. römisch kept as "Roman", not corrected to "Latin". Schleiermacher says Roman throughout — a Roman author speaks römisch. English usage would say Latin. Left alone as one of the few places where the period of the source can be felt in the English at no cost to sense.
11. The famous sentence. Entweder der Uebersezer läßt den Schriftsteller möglichst in Ruhe, und bewegt den Leser ihm entgegen; oder … Rendered "leaves the writer in peace as far as possible and moves the reader toward him." I record that I could not translate this sentence in ignorance of how it is usually put in English, that the project's own Venuti page had already put a version of it in front of me this session, and that in any case in Ruhe lassen → "leave in peace" and entgegenbewegen → "move toward" are close to forced. What was not forced and was chosen: Schriftsteller → "writer" rather than "author", to keep it distinct from Verfasser and Autor, both of which also occur in the passage and both of which I rendered "author". Whether that distinction is Schleiermacher's or merely his prose's variation, I do not know.
12. Sentence length left long. Passage C's third paragraph is one German sentence of 90-odd words, and A's central sentence is comparable. English convention would split them. They were kept whole, with dashes and colons, because the argument in both is a single suspended conditional and splitting it converts a demonstration into a list. The cost is real: the English is harder to read than most English of any period. A-shaw-spider-thread records Shaw splitting long source periods for readability, so this is the opposite choice on the same variable, made deliberately.
13. Wirkungskreis → "sphere of action" (A) and Stelle → "standpoint" (C, twice), against "position", which reads spatially and would have collided with the passage's literal talk of moving people about.

What was hard, and what I think I lost

14. The period register. Schleiermacher's German is academy prose of 1813: long-breathed, heavily subordinated, using wol, nämlich, freilich, zwar as connective furniture that modern English has no cheap equivalent for. I reached for "to be sure", "namely", "indeed", "for", which are the right register but are worked much harder in my English than their counterparts are in his German — a thin band of markers doing a wide job. The result reads as nineteenth-century-ish English prose rather than as 1813 German prose, which is a substitution, not a carry-over. internal-judgment-only.
15. The Dolmetschen gradient (B, last paragraph) is a cline in German — je weniger … desto mehr twice — and English "the less … the more" reproduces it exactly. That one came free, which is worth recording precisely because so little else did.
16. I could not keep Erscheinung (D, "natural phenomenon") from sounding like natural science; in German it is closer to "something that shows itself", and the sentence is about translation becoming a normal appearance in a culture's life rather than a curiosity.