German Historical Linguistics 2026, 1: Über-setzen. Translation Theory (Henrike Lähnemann)

Overview

Henrike Lähnemann presents translation as both a defining German literary practice and a series of deliberate linguistic, cultural, and political choices. From the etymology of Übersetzung and the domesticating-versus-foreignizing distinction to Jerome’s biblical methods and Martin Luther’s Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen, she traces how translation theory shapes German literary culture and why translations cannot preserve every feature of a source.

Key takeaways

German Übersetzung and English translation express the same basic crossing metaphor, but their word forms illustrate different borrowing habits: German translates word elements while English adopted a Latin-derived term via French.
Domesticating translation brings the source text toward readers; foreignizing translation asks readers to cross into the source culture, making the translator’s strategy visible.
Literary translation cannot preserve every feature at once: German feminine rhymes, English stress patterns, exact wording, and cultural references can require competing choices.
Luther’s use of Dolmetschen frames biblical translation as spoken mediation and negotiation, not simply the written replacement of words in one language with another.
Jerome’s emphasis on returning to Hebrew sources and balancing literalness with sense shaped the translation debate that Luther later made central to German biblical translation.
Lähnemann argues that a choice between freer and more literal translation is also a social and political decision, with Luther’s principles influencing later translators including Buber and Rosenzweig.

Chapters

0:00 German Translation as Literary Practice and Political Language

Henrike Lähnemann frames the term’s lectures around linguistic questions with social and political significance.
She introduces translation as a particularly strong German literary practice, in both theory and performance.
German translations can refresh Shakespeare’s jokes and cultural references for contemporary audiences, unlike performances retaining the original English wording.

7:20 Übersetzen and Translation: Bringing Meaning Across

English translation derives through French from Latin translatio, connected to transferre, “to bring across.”
German übersetzen preserves a similar crossing metaphor; stress distinguishes the intellectual act of translating from ferrying someone across water.
The shore-crossing image provides a framework for thinking about movement between a source work and its audience.

9:20 Domesticating and Foreignizing: Which Shore Does the Reader Visit?

A domesticating translation brings material from the source text’s shore to the reader, minimizing the effort of encountering a foreign setting.
A foreignizing approach invites readers to cross over and explore the source text’s concepts in their original context.
Lähnemann connects these strategies to influential German translation treatises, including Luther’s Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen.

11:20 Loanwords, Calques, and German Compounding

English translation is a loanword from Latin via French, whereas German Übersetzung translates the elements of the underlying word.
Lähnemann explains that German often forms compounds from existing words, while English more readily adopts French-derived loanwords.
The English term calque itself reflects the cross-language exchange of translation terminology.

14:10 Translation as Process, Product, and Adaptation

Words ending in Latin -tio and English -tion can denote both an action and its result; translation therefore names a process as well as a finished text.
Lähnemann distinguishes linguistic translation from other uses, such as the “translation” of a saint’s relics or clinical translation as applying medical knowledge.
She raises boundary cases including film adaptations, glosses, and paraphrases that expand biblical narratives for vernacular readers.
Medieval Latin-learning glosses preserved rare Old High German vocabulary, including technical terms needed to understand Virgil’s Georgics.

21:25 Roman Jakobson, Poetry, and the Interpreter as Go-Between

Roman Jakobson argues that poetry is untranslatable in the strict sense because translators cannot preserve every feature, such as exact wording and rhyme, simultaneously.
German hymns often use feminine rhymes; English’s loss of many unstressed final syllables can make singable rhyme translations difficult.
The Latin root of interpretation evokes an intermediary, illustrated by Mercury or Hermes carrying messages between realms.
The saying that translators are traitors reflects the unavoidable bias and loss involved in choosing which features to preserve.

26:30 Why Luther Chose Dolmetschen for Translation

Luther’s Sendbrief uses Dolmetschen, a term associated with spoken interpreting, negotiation, and communication between opposing sides.
The word travelled through Turkish and Slavic languages and is traced in the lecture to an older Near Eastern term for an intermediary.
Luther’s choice contrasts with Middle High German traditions using terms such as tiuten, which emphasize rendering meaning in German.
His method asks translators to imagine how an angel would have spoken to Mary in German, foregrounding spoken idiom.

32:45 Middle Low German Resources and Agathe Lasch’s Legacy

Lähnemann highlights the newly online Mittelniederdeutsches Wörterbuch as a resource for comparing Middle Low German with Middle High German.
She commemorates Agathe Lasch, a pioneering German lexicographer who helped shape modern dictionary work.
Lasch’s lexicographical project was interrupted after its first volume when she was deported and murdered by the Nazi regime.

35:49 Alexandria, the Rosetta Stone, and Jerome’s Bible Translation

The Rosetta Stone’s Greek text helped scholars decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs by comparison with the Egyptian inscription.
Alexandria served as a center for translation, biblical scholarship, Homeric commentary, and early library organization.
The Bible’s multilingual origins complicate translation: New Testament authors wrote Greek with differing levels of fluency, while the underlying speech traditions included Aramaic.
Jerome’s Latin Vulgate established a major precedent for the word-for-word versus sense-for-sense debate and for returning to Hebrew sources.

45:05 Luther’s Sendbrief: Translation as a Programmatic Decision

Luther challenged the authority of Jerome’s Vulgate as a fixed, inspired text by returning to original-language biblical editions, enabled by Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Greek New Testament.
Lähnemann presents Luther’s translation as an ongoing process rather than a monolithic finished product.
Choosing freer or more literal wording is programmatic, not merely convenient: each approach expresses a judgment about fidelity to the source.
Luther’s principles influenced later German writing, including Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig’s Hebrew Bible translation and Walter Benjamin’s essay on the task of the translator.

Summary, takeaways, and chapters were generated by AI from the video's transcript and may contain errors. The video belongs to its creator, Henrike Lähnemann.