alexpgp | Why St. Jerome?

So, in between paragraphs on how pollutants are to be monitored at the facility for which I'm translating the document, I became curious: just why, exactly, is St. Jerome considered the patron saint of translators?

I found a possible explanation (tongue planted squarely in my cheek) at James Kiefer's Christian Biographies site, wherein it is said, in an article devoted to Jerome:

Jerome was intemperate in controversy, and any correspondence with him tended to degenerate into a flame war.

I'd love to drop that line on the Lantra-L mailing list (which is - what else - a translator's mailing list), but then again, take another look at the quote!

Actually, without doing a lot of research, it seems Jerome translated the Bible into Latin (not Old Latin, but the Latin spoken and written by the Latin-speakers of his day, known as the Vulgate Latin, or the 'Latin of the common people'), which is no mean accomplishment. From that article:

Vulgate Latin is classical Latin in the first stages of evolving into such modern languages as Spanish, French, and Italian. It has begun the process of changing from an inflected language (in which words have various endings, or inflections, which are used to show the relation of the word to other words in the sentence) to a separate-word language like English (in which additional words, such as prepositions, are used, along with word order, to show the function of the word). Thus, in classical Latin, "He spoke to me," is DIXIT MIHI or MIHI DIXIT, but in Vulgate Latin it is DIXIT AD ME.

What is notable, perhaps, about Jerome's scholarship in translation was his determination to master Hebrew, so that he could translate from that language, and not have to rely on the Greek translation from the Hebrew. At any rate, it's an interesting article.

Back to work. Not counting the individual pages I have to do, there are just over 1500 words left to translate in the main document.

Cheers...