A corpus-based analysis of the Song of Songs' early modern translations (1535-1611)

Early modern English translations of the Bible are attested to be nine (see Herbert, Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible 1525-1961, 1968), their publication ranging from 1526 (Tyndale’s Bible), to 1611, when King James Bible was printed. This latter milestone version fixed and somehow solved some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century linguistic controversies, thus standing out as the most authoritative English translation of the Sacred Scriptures in the following centuries (see Crystal, Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, 2010). Taking into consideration the above-mentioned nine translations, this paper aims at addressing linguistic issues (especially at a lexical, semantic and pragmatic level) related to the different translation styles of The Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon). In order to conduct this kind of study on such a wide and linguistically varied dataset, a parallel corpus will be created by uploading .txt files of the different early modern translations of text. The corpus will be automatically tagged and annotated thanks to the use of corpus analysis tools – e.g. #Lancsbox and/or Sketch Engine – and the VARD 2 software1. Such tools will also be employed to analyze different lexical choices among the texts uploaded. Finally, lexemic differences will be commented on by conducting a qualitative analysis of the data extracted. Therefore, translational choices will be contextualized within the historical and religious milieus of the target texts considered, not to mention references to genre-related issues and to the source texts adopted by early modern translators.