Research project The difficult birth of written Latvian through translation in the 17th century

Written Latvian emerged through translations of Christianity’s key texts by non-native German clergy in the 16th and the 17th centuries, when preaching to people in their language became essential in religious practice.

From the scarce sources available in Old Latvian, many prints have been digitalised and made available for computational analysis. Never printed and not digitalised, the fragile and fading manuscript by Andreas Getzelius (1628) contains the earliest translation of a complete book from the Bible, the Proverbs of Solomon, into Latvian, which is using Martin Luther’s edition of the Bible as its source. Addition of Getzelius’ translation to the corpora of digitally available annotated Old Latvian texts will serve as a pilot for using AI-powered technology in handling other handwritten texts in Old Latvian.

Digital methods will be explored to align and make meaningful comparisons across three translations of the same book, the Proverbs of Solomon, that were accomplished into Latvian during the 17th century, by Andreas Getzelius, Georg Mancelius and Ernst Glück. Analysis of these parallel corpora can be expected to give insight in the development of translation strategies applied by these early non-native translators into Latvian and their underlying ideologies. Their work will be set in the context of vernacular Bible translations taking place in the Swedish Livonia and elsewhere in Europe at the time.