Project presentation

The main reason that justifies this project is the cultural, linguistic and ideological interest that such a research presents, both for the history of Romanian culture and for establishing the interferences between European cultures, the influences and the cultural configuration of a European unity in a period of modernization under the impulse of the Enlightenment.

The analysis of some Romanian translations of the 18th century, which have been the subject of recent research and provide an image of the ​​interest areas of the Romanian intellectuals and their modalities of accessing texts or authors they were interested in, allowed us to notice that there are sometimes missing data regarding the original or the year of publication of the intermediary used, while for some other the paternity of the Romanian translator has not been established yet.

The project, with a predominantly philological character, proposes to inventory the translations in relation to Western books, to establish the sources of the translations and, where appropriate, to look for and identify the translator through interdisciplinary research, using information from areas such as history, linguistics, stylistics, graphology, genealogy, etc. At the beginning of modernization, with the exception of the Transylvanian School, laic translations were made on the initiative of isolated scholars, belonging to the aristocracy, and who, interested in the Western culture, translated texts on their own. Despite the fact that they did not work on orders, often had in view a receiver.

The discovery (and recording) of new information, and especially of some unknown translations as an important objective of the proposed project, is facilitated by the emergence in recent decades of more and more catalogues of Romanian old books and manuscripts. Of these catalogues mention should be made of those by Gabriel Strempel, Dudas Florian Ion B. Mureşianu, Olimpia Mitric, Virgil Candea.

After serious documentation, the whole information regarding the translations of the 18th century, in all the Romanian provinces, made directly from the originals’ language or through other language intermediary translations will be collected, systematized and presented analytically and critically, for the first time. In addition to literary texts, the project will also study scientific translations that contributed to the formation of functional styles of the Romanian language. For a better use of the information obtained, they will be included in a database.

The project will finalize with a work we consider particularly important in that it will include new research, but it will also put together the existing ones, generally published in journals with low circulation and, as such, less accessible even to the specialized public. The project will have a final volume printed by a recognized publisher. It will contain an introductory study that will present: the general state of the art, the purpose of the project. The substance of the volume will consist of the chronological description of the translations. The material will be systematized and briefly presented according to uniform writing rules, so as to obtain a list of all Romanian translations, with information as complete as possible, to contain (for each item): title, Romanian versions and their translators, whether it was printed or remained in manuscript, description, arguments for establishing paternity, the translated author and a brief presentation of his works, the title of the original, year and place of publication, (where applicable), the used intermediary, the text differences between the Romanian version and the original, stylistic and linguistic influences of the original (through contrastive method), the main linguistic features of the translation. The concluding chapter will precise the dimensions of the Western influence during the studied period. We will analyse interest fields of the Romanian scholars, Western authors translated, and the means of establishing intercultural relations with other European countries, the importance and ideological, literary, scientific, linguistic influence of the translation. We also intend to transpose on electronic support the research results to be disseminated on CD-ROM and to elaborate a hypertext presentation to be consulted on the Internet.