TRANSLATING A FIGHT SCENE IN PETRONIUS' SATYRICON

Abstract

Ancient mock-epic or mock-heroic literature illustrates several important problems in the translation of Latin and Greek, but most importantly the problem of style and tone. The recently available option of searching in a computer database for words and phrases wherever they occur in Classical literature has given translators their first real opportunity to do the necessary research on style and tone within reasonable lengths of time; in the past, even when the best dictionaries and concordances where at hand, hours of searching through them could in some cases be necessary to determine for certain the flavor of even a few words, so that for translation of all but the shortest works of literature thorough research was simply impractical. Technological shortcuts will probably contribute to the raising of translation standards and the production of texts accurate and attractive enough even for an academic marketplace where competition with the Classics has grown enormously during the past few decades.