Einige Bemerkungen zum Übersetzen mittelhochdeutscher Texte am Beispiel der Marienlegende Heinrich Klausners

The problems encountered in translating a MHG text into NHG are syntactic and lexical in nature. The introductory elements to subordinate clauses, for instance, are quite ambiguous (cf. the MHG conjunction daz) so that their semantics has to be inferred from the context of the sentence, a task that often proves none too easy. The situation becomes even more difficult when dealing with the lexicon. Here it is necessary to concretize the meaning of many abstract words, i.e., render them unambiguous. Without this, the translation would be vague and perhaps even unintelligible to the modern reader (cf. MHG meister = teacher, master artisan, poet, church father, apostle, etc.). The resulting loss of semantic meaning could also be detrimental to the general comprehension of the text. Another issue (which in many cases cannot be resolved), is best described by the term "intertextuality" and deals with allusions to contemporary literary contexts. In this case, they refer to a variant of "Transitus Mariae", which is often only alluded to and cannot be identified with any certainty.