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Fifteenth-century Italy witnessed an explosion both in the production
of Latin translations from the Greek and in theoretical writings on translations.
Nevertheless, humanist translation theory is more or less ignored by many
modern translation specialists. In this article I draw attention to some frequent
issues in fifteenth-century discussions of translation that show how Renaissance
theoreticians addressed a number of the same questions as those raised in
contemporary translation studies, for instance by Antoine Berman, Lawrence
Venuti and Anne Coldiron. From the beginning of the fifteenth century there
was among Italian humanists a discussion of what we today would call
domesticating versus foreignizing translation. The father of humanist translation
theory, the Byzantine Manuel Chrysoloras, advocated some kind of foreignizing
translation in which the foreignness of the source language would remain visible
and the reader made to move towards the author. However, humanist
theoreticians increasingly began to favour domesticating translation, even
developing a new terminology to describe their aims and methods.
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