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Chapter 1 - Translating Roman Republican Political Culture

from Part I - Original Essays

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2025

By
Amy Russell
Edited by
Amy Russell  and
Hans Beck
Translated by
Kathrin Lüddecke
Amy Russell
Affiliation:
Brown University, Rhode Island
Hans Beck
Affiliation:
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany
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Summary

The study of Roman history has always been multilingual, and some of the most important work on the Roman Republic is in German. Today, however, fewer and fewer anglophone students and scholars read German. The result is that major work published in German can go unread and uncited. This new essay by Amy Russell surveys the problem and potential solutions, as well as exploring some of the difficulties of translation from German to English and a glossary of untranslatable terms. It is important that we balance the benefits of multilingual publishing with the need to make Roman history accessible to all. Translation and collaboration are among the methods recommended. Translation from German brings specific problems, as some concepts can be expressed more easily in one language or the other; Russell takes a case study of the term Öffentlichkeit and its similarities to and differences from English phrases such as ‘public space’. Those differences have significantly affected how scholars writing in German and English have conceptualized the public and the political in the Roman Republic. A glossary elucidates a range of other hard-to-translate concepts.

Keywords

translationRoman RepublicGermanRoman historymultilingualismhistory of scholarshippublic sphere
Type
Chapter
Information
The Roman Republic and Political Culture
German Scholarship in Translation
 , pp. 3 - 26
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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