Truth, Doubt and Hearsay in 17^th-Century Russian News Translations

ABSTRACT

On the basis of material consisting of Russian news translations from 1669 and 1670 (the so-called Vesti-Kuranty), along with the German and Dutch news reports from which the translations were made, this paper examines expressions for the reliability of the reported information. This includes formulaic expressions of truth and doubt, as well as syntactic means of marking hearsay. The study shows that in most cases, the translators took care to understand the reliability judgments expressed in the source texts and render them adequately in Russian, although some exceptions can be seen, especially in expressions of doubt. The existence of formulaic expressions that were not literal translations of the expressions found in the source texts shows that Russian news texts were developing their own genre characteristics.

KEYWORDS:

• Early modern newspapers
• translation
• historical pragmatics
• formulaic expressions
• hearsay

ORCID

Christine Watson http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2472-3855

Notes

1 The research on which this paper is based was funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond) through grant no. RFP12-0055:1. I am grateful to professor Ingrid Maier, Uppsala University, for her comments on an earlier version of this paper.

2 In Maier’s edition of the source texts, italics are used for words that are written in Roman script in newspapers mainly printed in Gothic letters, and in the edition of the Russian translations, italics are used for superscript letters in the manuscript. In this article, I ignore both these uses and instead use italics to highlight the expressions under discussion in each example.

3 Where possible, the English translations correspond to both the German/Dutch and Russian quotes, and are therefore sometimes approximate. When the languages differ substantially, the diverging readings are given in square brackets, introduced by ‘Ger.’, ‘Du.’ or ‘Ru.’, respectively.

4 Maier (2008, 404–405) also comments on the erroneous translation of notificiren as ‘confirm’, adding that the king of Spain had in fact not died at this time (November 1669), but died only in the following year. Rumors about his death were frequent, but in this case, the translator made the report seem like more than a rumor.

5 It also occurs three times in a comparative meaning, without indicating hearsay, and once as a particle.

6 In the article from 2005, Wiemer does not make the distinction between reportive and quotative that he makes in his 2010 article.

7 Since the whole passage is in turn presented as the content of letters to the Crown’s army, the subjunctive (hätte … gegeben) is used in the main clause as well.

8 This form is morphologically ambiguous, in that it can be either indicative or subjunctive, but because of the surrounding subjunctive forms, I choose to interpret it as a subjunctive as well.