Talk:Cuchulain of Muirthemne

#Style - translation process
Can anyone with knowledge of the matter and/or access to sources help?

I’m making a few help-the-reader mends - clarifications, potentially distracting typos etc - and I’m not clear on necessary detail re Lady Gregory’s innovative translation process. The article says

The ultimate goal .. was to produce an edition .. accessible to a general audience. [Lady Gregory] felt many of the earlier translations suffered from their attempts to move quite literally from Gaelic into English, resulting in a language that could be awkward at times. Instead, she sought a more indigenous Irish style, familiar to her through her efforts at collecting local folklore. .. [Sean] Connolly, an Irish speaker, translated a section of the legend into spoken Irish, which Lady Gregory then returned, literally, to English.

I’m unclear about “returned”, in that final phrase, “returned .. to English”. It suggests tht the translation process had already gone via English. I didn’t have that impression, from the article generally. I had gathered tht Connolly translated from the original language straight to current spoken Irish - which he or someone else, probably Lady Gregory, wrote down - and this was then translated, as literally as possible, into English: completing, basically, a two-stage process. This may have been slightly silly of me? What form were the Gaelic sources in? and how likely is it tht Connolly was literate in Gaelic? Did Lady Gregory instead work up a present-day Standard English text for him to translate to spoken Irish? - making a three-stage process, with Standard English as the first step?

The other thing I’d want to clarify appears earlier: “attempts to move quite literally from Gaelic into English”. Does that simply mean “attempting to translate the Gaelic literally”? But “move” is an unusual word; and “quite” is obscure in describing free vs. literal translation - “moderately”, “fairly”, “very” are more familiar. Can anyone confirm the meaning?

- SquisherDa (talk) 17:20, 31 May 2019 (UTC)


 * I think you're right. The original in stylistic and courtly written Gaelic was rendered into modern demotic spoken Gaelic, and then by her into English. So it wasn't "returned" to English.PatrickGuinness (talk) 15:04, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Thanks! I’ve acted on that. How does this (from the article as it now stands) look?: The ultimate goal of Lady Gregory’s translation efforts was to produce an edition of the Cú Chulainn legends which would be accessible to a general audience. She felt many of the earlier translations suffered from their attempts to make a literal translation in current English of the original stylised and courtly written Gaelic, resulting in language that could be awkward at times. Instead, she sought a more indigenous Irish style, familiar to her through her efforts at collecting local folklore. With the help of Sean Connolly, she undertook an experiment in translation. Connolly, an Irish speaker, translated a section of the legend into spoken Irish, which Lady Gregory then translated literally into English. The results convinced her that the colloquial Hiberno-English of Kiltartan retained much of the character of the old language, and that it would be an acceptable translation tool.

- SquisherDa (talk) 00:07, 6 June 2019 (UTC)