At the dawn of the Middle English period, the language saw a number of different terms referring to the process of translation. One of these, WENDAN, had a literal meaning ‘to translate’, often enhanced by prefixes (cf. awendan, gewendan, BT). Others acquired the meaning only by attaching the intensifying prefix a- or the resultative prefix ge-, including areccan, gereccan ‘to interpret, translate’(BT), geþeodan, gecirran, gehwierfan ‘to translate’ (BT), but also over-, as in oferlædan ‘to carry across, translate’ (BT). Interestingly enough, in none of these cases was the meaning limited solely to ‘translating’; instead, semantic domains of the verbs in question included such meanings as ‘to join, connect… adjust’ (geþeodan), ‘to turn upside down’, ‘pervert’ (awendan), ‘oppress’, ‘humble, humiliate’ (lædan) etc. (cf. BT, OED, MED), thus providing an interesting insight into the nature of verbs used, among others, to refer to the process of translating.
After the Norman Conquest, however, the meaning of ‘transfer between languages’ in the above verbs starts to disappear. Instead, the language borrows the foreign term translaten (F.--L., Skeat), which at the end of the 13th century starts to function along some of the above terms in the meaning of ‘transferring, changing, replacing’ (cf. MED), and in the 14th century acquires the literal meaning of ‘translating’ (MED, Skeat), eliminating other terms from use in this context.
The present paper focuses on the loss of the meaning ‘to translate’ from the semantic domains of the native verbs and the pattern of its replacement by the borrowed term to indicate ‘transfer of a message between two languages’. The study shall analyze affiliated texts classified by date and dialect in the electronic corpora of The Dictionary of Old English Corpus Database and The Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, with special emphasis on the 12th and 13th centuries.