Friedrich Schleiermacher contemporaries and their considerations on the translation act

Abstract

The area of research of this article is Translation Studies. Our study consists in a contrastive analysis of some ideas found in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s essay Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersezens and the conceptions of three 19th century German scholars regarding the act of translation: August Boeckh, Karl Schäfer and Ludwig Seeger. To achieve this purpose, we take into account comments on the translations of Johann Heinrich Voß, whose German versions of Homer imposed a series of innovations in the fields of German syntax, poetry and even semantics. Our specific goal is to explain briefly how each one of the above-mentioned Schleiermacher’s contemporaries thought about different methods, procedures and strategies of translation, thus emphasizing the convergent and divergent ways of thinking among their different proposals. Finally, we can conclude that there was a great variety of 19th century scholars, writers, philologists and translators theorizing on the act of translation, for instance, in translators’ prefaces and introductions regarding Greek and Latin Classics. This differs from what is normally discussed nowadays in the field of Translation Studies, where the attention seems to be focused almost only on Schleiermacher’s ideas.