It depends on how we define sense in this case.
It’s not just that translation was called something different: it also meant something different. In Searls’s account, which draws heavily on the work of the twentieth-century French theorist Antoine Berman, translation was first a matter of content, and only later a matter of form. Cicero believed that sense should be translated for sense, not “counting out words for the reader,” but “weighing them out.” A few centuries later, St. Jerome, author of the great Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, argued that translations of the mysteries should be word for word, but everything else should be, like Cicero advocated, sense for sense. There was an easy confidence in antiquity, and all the way up to the Renaissance, that translation was indeed possible—though the more modern language may need to be stretched to accommodate the semantic richness, and classical authority, of the original. ©
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