An Analysis of "The Histories" translation

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An Analysis of “The Histories” translation

The first translation of “The Histories” was written in 1910, and so had many archaic words and constructions that are archaic, but most of the changes made in the 1998 translation are stylistic changes.  An example of the second passage being changed to sound better, rather than make more sense to the modern reader, is the use of shorter, simple sentences, rather than the long sentences in the 1910 version, containing many clauses.  While the earlier passage has only five sentences over sixteen lines, the 1998 version has been broken up into six sentences, over 12 lines.  The reason these alterations have been made by the author of the later passage is that he or she is writing for a more modern audience.  In the 88 years that have passed between the writing of the two passages, none of the words have become obsolete, but some of the lexis has become archaic, and so the author of the 1998 text has changed some words, either semantically or morphologically to accommodate his audience.

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As both texts are translations of a Latin text, they are both set out in a similar way, according to the appearance of the original text, and so there is little that can be said about the graphological differences between text A (1910) and B (1998).  Some words in text A are not used in modern language often, and are thus archaic, such as “defile”, and so were replaced by a modern synonym; in the case of this example, “defile” was substituted for “pass”. Another archaism that has been changed in text B is the use of the circumflex accent over ...

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