Reconstructing Gavin Douglas’s Translation Practice in the Eneados Using a Corpus Linguistic-Based Method

One of the main questions in the study of translation is whether something can be translated perfectly. Is a flawless transposition of ideas, style, and context possible across languages? The generally accepted answer to this question is ‘no’—the semantic networks of one language are too complex to be reproduced perfectly by another. However, closer examination of the topic reveals the issue is even more fraught, raising questions such as how a perfect translation is defined, how to evaluate it, and if it is even desirable. Different answers to these questions yield different approaches to translation and different implications as to the nature of meaning and how it is accessed. Some approaches separate meaning from language or from its physical context. Others, like the one pursued here, argue that meaning is multidimensional, created not just by language, but by context and presentation. Therefore, a multidimensional, interdisciplinary method must be adopted when studying translation. This paper discusses the practical application of such an interdisciplinary method that applies digital tools and resources to the study of medieval translation— specifically Gavin Douglas’s medieval Scottish translation of the Aeneid, the Eneados (1513). This is the subject of the author’s DPhil project at the University of Oxford, titled Equivalency, Page Design, and Corpus Linguistics: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Gavin Douglas’s ‘Eneados’ (completed May 2021), which argues that such a method can be indispensable for the study of medieval texts by making larger texts more accessible and offering new perspectives on them. This paper considers a specific study directly from this doctoral work that cross references the evolution of Douglas’s translation method with changes in his source’s layout. Such a comparison reveals a new perspective on Douglas that is relevant to longstanding critical debates on the nature of Douglas’s humanism. This paper first introduces Gavin Douglas and the Eneados and various critical debates regarding his translation method and humanist status. It then discusses the interdisciplinary method adopted here that makes use of a digital resource, designed with reference to descriptive translation studies, corpus linguistics, and philology. This resource is described in detail. A case study is then presented that statistically analyses Douglas’s translation method by means of line ratios—a measure of how many lines Douglas uses to translate one line of Latin—and compares these results