Yeah I was pretty wrong. I quite literally just assumed everyone in the ancient world wrote exactly like Cicero, at his “most Asiatic”, all the time.
For instance, the apostle Paul seems to write in a what get’s called an attic style, but it involves extremely long winding sentences that avoid saying their point until the very last words.
Gracias Javier. This is helpful. In recent translations, where the text has two or three synonymous adjectives (of no doctrinal importance), I’ve started to free up from the felt obligation to render them into the same number of words, and sonetimes just using one adjective when the original has two. It’s unnecessary to say that something is ‘disagreable and displeasing’.
Likewise, sometimes a single pali term might require two words in your target language.
You can’t get caught up in word for word, modern translation studies has long ago moved on from that. The writings of Eugene Nida have been quite influential in this regard.
Even in the classical world, writers like Cicero spoke against the idea of translating verbum pro verbo.
Yes. In general it’s quite obvious that word-for-word is a bit silly; but I was thinking specifically of the lists of synonyms that are typical in the suttas. The common practice has generally been to equally translate with a string of synonyms. It was quite freeing to let that go.