From Latin to Middle English: The translation of medical texts and its contribution to the enrichment of English.

摘要

In the English Late Middle Ages, medical literature constituted the largest corpus of academic writing translated from Latin into Middle English. The edition and linguistic analysis of medical manuscripts are proving to be essential not only for the History of Medicine (to fill in the gaps that still exist concerning the medieval period) but also for the History of English (to better understand the origins of a scientific prose which, in the previous centuries, had been excluded from the domain of the vernacular).;This thesis has analyzed the difficulties met and the strategies developed by four medieval translators when rendering into Middle English three works originally written in Latin: an anonymous treatise on phlebotomy, Chauliac's Chirurgia Magna and Macer Floridus' De viribus herbarum. The side by side lexical, morphological and syntactic study of the translations and their Latin sources presents translators as the chief creators of a technical register in the vernacular, producing an English highly modeled on Latin forms and structures, but also striving for its autonomy.