[hdw]

We tend to assume on this thread that "translation" means rendering a work of literature from one discrete language into another, e.g. from French into English; but what about doing a version of an older text into the modern form of the same language? If I do a modern English version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or Mirabell decides to render the Nibelungenlied into modern German, is that also a "translation", or just an "updating"?

Seamus Heaney seems to be on a bit of a translation roll at the moment, and after "translating" the Anglo-Saxon/Old English Beowulf into modern English, he has turned his attention to the 15th-century Scots poet Robert Henryson. See the excellent review of his Henryson "translations" by Colin Burrow ("Be Nice to Mice") in London Review of Books 8 October 2009.

As Scots is generally speaking about as different from Standard English as the mainland Scandinavian languages are from each other, it may make sense to speak of "translating" from one to the other. Likewise, Old English - before the transfusion of French and Latin vocabulary into English in the Middle Ages - was a very different, more Germanic language than the English of later times, so maybe a rendering of Beowulf into modern English does count as a "translation". But where's your chronological cut-off point? If you edit Shakespeare's plays and modernise his language so that modern schoolkids can understand them, have you "translated", or simply "updated"?

Harry