Finding the ‘Right’ Irish for the New Testament

Abstract

An Irish translation of the New Testament was published in Dublin in 1602. This publication, and the translation work which underlay it, did not appear in a vacuum: two earlier printed books in Irish had paved the way, viz. John Carswell’s translation of Knox’s Forme of Prayer and Ministrations of the Sacraments, published in Edinburgh in 1567, and Seaán Ó Cearnaigh’s primer of the Irish language and catechism translation, published in Dublin in 1571. This paper seeks to shed light on the process by which an appropriate register was arrived at for Protestant printing in Irish, and in particular for the New Testament, through an examination of some of the linguistic and stylistic features of these texts, with regard both to decisions made by the individual translators and to sociolinguistic factors which may have limited their room to manoeuvre. These factors include contemporary conceptions of and attitudes to different language varieties, the lack of alternative models, and the nature and level of education received by individual translators. This paper builds upon the pioneering research of Ailbhe Ó Corráin (2013) to show that linguistically that portion of the Irish New Testament completed after 1597 has a more colloquial and dialectal quality than that which preceded it. This is tentatively connected with specific changes in the team responsible.

Keywords

• Early Modern Irish
• translation
• register
• dialect
• literacy