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# Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersezens (On the Different Methods of Translating)

**Authors:** Friedrich Schleiermacher · **Year:** 1813 (lecture; printed in Sämmtliche Werke III/2, 1838, pp. 207–245) · **Venue:** Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, Berlin **Link:** [archive.org/details/philosophischeun02schl](https://archive.org/details/philosophischeun02schl) · **Licence:** [public domain](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/) (the author died in 1834). The library text is OCR of the whole volume; the lecture starts at p. 207.

classic

- [Publisher's page](https://archive.org/details/philosophischeun02schl)
- [PDF](https://archive.org/download/philosophischeun02schl/philosophischeun02schl.pdf)

**Authors (1)**

1. Friedrich Schleiermacher

Citations and author metrics from OpenAlex (); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

A lecture that founded modern translation theory. Schleiermacher first separates the interpreter (*Dolmetscher*), who works in business and everyday life, from the translator proper, who works in scholarship and art. In business the words name objects everyone can point to, so a word-for-word correspondence mostly holds. In thought and art the language shapes what is said, so it does not. He then sets aside two things that are not translation: paraphrase, which adds and explains to carry the content (used for science), and imitation (*Nachbildung*), which rebuilds the work's effect in new material (used for art). For translation proper there are only two ways. Either the translator "leaves the writer in peace as much as possible and moves the reader towards him", or he leaves the reader in peace and moves the writer towards the reader. The two must not be mixed in one work. The first way needs readers who feel the foreign in the text, and a whole body of such translations, which over time reshapes the target language.

## Ideas

- I1. The two ways as two settings of the encoder in `tools/translate`. Moving the reader means keeping the source's constructions wherever the target grammar allows: the *and … and* chains of the wayyiqtol, *it came to pass*, Hebrew order. Moving the writer means the target standard plus a modern author's delta. JPS and KJV lean to the first way, WEB to the second. Measure each author's "foreignness": the share of meta tokens where the author's chunk agrees with a source-literal rendering rather than with the standard's choice.
- I2. The no-mixing rule as a test that a delta is one author. Compute the foreignness of I1 per book for each author. A real author should be stable across books, while a delta learned on shuffled or merged authors should not. This adds a consistency check to the shuffled-delta control.
- I3. The interpreter and translator split predicts where a plain lexicon is enough. Report the translator's lexical residual separately for "business" text, the school's fact and explain lines with concrete objects, and for the Bibles. If Schleiermacher is right, the meta-world lexicon should come much closer to zero on the first.
- I4. Paraphrase and imitation are different products from translation. Name them in the translator's modes: exact (byte for byte with residual), translation (normal mode), paraphrase (generation from the world level, which may add explanation). Keep their scores apart, so that a world-level paraphrase is never counted as a translation.
- I5. Schleiermacher's claim that translations reshape the target language is the history behind open problem 6. The archaic English the standard leans to is the KJV's language, made by a translation of the first kind. Weight the standard to modern English and keep the Bible register as a delta.

## For Mova

The lecture names the axis an author delta moves along. The foreignness index of I1 and I2 can be computed from what `profile.rs` and `measure.rs` already log: for each meta token, the standard's chunk, the delta's chunk and the source's own order. I4 is a naming decision for the README of `tools/translate`.

Topics: [Machine translation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/machine-translation/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```
@book{schleiermacher1813ueber,
  title = {{Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersezens (On the Different Methods of Translating)}},
  author = {Schleiermacher, Friedrich},
  year = {1813},
  url = {https://archive.org/details/philosophischeun02schl}
}
```

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