A translator at the service of history: Constantin Erbiceanu

Abstract

This paper presents a text still little known to Romanian researchers in translation studies and even less known to the international academia. Yet, it can be considered doubly important for the history of interpreting. Constantin Erbiceanu’s Romanian version (1897) of the Biographies of the great Greek dragomans (interpreters) of the Ottoman Empire by Epaminonda I. Stamatiades (1865) offers, on the one hand, an unprecedented perspective on the Phanariotes who took turns for almost a century as princes of the Danubian Principalities and, on the other hand, well-documented profiles, touching upon all essential aspects of the profession. With this overview of the Romanian version of the text, we want to emphasize the importance of an informed translator free to choose his texts, and to show how a translation can help a people know itself better and can consolidate a language that is still defining its identity (e.g., Romanian in the late 19th century). We also hope to convince that translating this work into a widely spoken language would benefit researchers in the history of interpreting. We tackle the subject from several perspectives. After a brief survey of the role and destiny of the original, we look at the Romanian translation by answering three main questions: Who is the translator? Why did he consider the translation necessary? How did he translate? This latter question is answered from the points of view of the translator’s paratext, of content as a useful source for the history of interpreting and of language (Romanian scientific terminology was still in its infancy at the time). In this last respect, we look at a series of borrowings from French in order to see what their fate has been in contemporary Romanian.