University of Insubria

The Insubria Unit will explore (re)translation as a form of religious and ideological appropriation, through the comparison of English versions of the Psalter produced between 1535 and 1640. Translation has long been acknowledged as a form of ideological and political action (Baker 2015; Tymoczko 2007, 2010) and retranslations in particular can embody dissent or distance from the institutionalised discourse represented by previous versions (Venuti 2004). As Venuti (2013: 97) explains, retranslations are often “designed deliberately to form particular identities and to have particular institutional effects”, contrasting those furthered by existing translations. Texts with significant cultural authority in particular – a paradigmatic example being the Bible, the most influential book of Western culture – are likely to be retranslated multiple times, as “diverse readerships […] will seek to interpret [these texts] according to their own values” (Venuti 2013: 96), which will be then inscribed in the retranslation. This is especially true of the Book of Psalms that, as the mainstay of worship in both Judaism and Christianity, is the most frequently retranslated and quoted biblical book (Becking 2007: 2).This research will merge qualitative and quantitative perspectives, bringing together historical linguistics, stylistics, corpus linguistics, and translation studies to compare different versions of the Psalms. Corpus-linguistics methods will provide a quantitative grounding for the analysis, on which the comparison of the texts will be based. The differences between versions identified through corpus methods will be analysed from a stylistic and historical perspective, to investigate how different linguistic features can convey contrasting discursive constructions, indicative of cultural, political, and confessional distance. By comparing different versions, in relation to their socio-historical situation as well as their paratextual and extratextual contexts, the Insubria Unit aims to bring to the fore the ideologically marked nature and function of the rewriting of the Psalms.