Translation in the ancient Iranian world (Übersetzung im antiken iranischen Kulturraum)

Preliminary Material

“…The question inevitably arises why two Persians, one of them a member of the royal family, the other an official of the Persian administration in Egypt, should communicate with one another not in their own native tongue, nor even in a language spoken in Egypt, but in Aramaic. The only plausible answer is that the sender dictated his message in Persian, a scribe translated it ad hoc and wrote it down into Aramaic, and that a second scribe retranslated it ex tempore into Persian …" (de Blois 2007(de Blois : 1194. This notion of an Achaemenid scribe reading off in Persian (or some other language) a text written in Aramaic was famously imagined by Polotsky (1932: 273), who suggested that Achaemenid chancery practices were predicated on the twinned assumptions of a) monolingualism in writing practice and b) multilingualism of the scribe.…”

“…The meaning of mfāraš was long forgotten (the Septuagint, for example, leaves it without translation), but it has plausibly been argued (Schaeder 1930: 1-14;Polotsky 1932), that it means 'interpreted, translated' or more precisely 'translated ex tempore'" (de Blois 2007(de Blois : 1195. With respect to this word mfāraš, F.F.…”