A SACRAL TEXT IN THE FOCUS OF DIACHRONY: LOST IN TRANSLATION? (As exemplified by the material of Latin, Old Greek and Germanic languages)

Abstract

The article concerns the research of functional and linguistic peculiarities of religious discourse in different historical periods. The author considers the religious discourse as a method, consistently reproduced in time and space, of transmitting the complex of meanings of a sacral text with account of the mentality, religious experience and objective reality of people speaking a certain language in a certain phase of history. The contrastive analysis of polyglot sacral texts appearing as a significant part of religious discourse and being a subject of rendering into different languages is worthwhile only when historical, chronological, sociocultural and situative factors which have an impact on the meaning of a sacral text are taken into consideration. Since translators were expected to observe the compulsory rules of rendering the meaning and structure of the source text, translations appeared that distorted the text meaning or did not reproduce it accurately.