Coping with a foreign language for specific purposes in the early sixteenth century: the Low German translation of Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Buch der Cirurgia

Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Buch der Cirurgia is the first surgical handbook printed in German. It is transmitted in five different editions, the first of which dated 1497. This compilation of Classical, Arabic, Medieval and Late Medieval sources, integrated by the personal experience of the author had an extraordinary success in 16th-century Europe, as witnessed by the existence, in addition to the Low German one, of an English (London, 1525) and a Dutch (Utrecht, 1535) translation. The High German surgical compendium became also popular in Northern Germany, where in 1518 a Low German translation – the Boek der Wundenartzstedye – was produced and printed by Ludwig Dietz in Rostock. The very existence of this Low German edition of the text represents a precious resource for the contrastive investigation of the High and Low German medical language. In this study, this Low German translation of Hieronymus Brunschwig’s surgical handbook are contrasted with its High German source in order to highlight the strategies employed by the Low German translator to render beyond doubt the exact message of the original. In this, particular attention is paid to the rendering of the surgical lexicon connected to the semantic fields of anatomy, pathology, surgical technique and instruments. The comparison of the two texts allows focusing on similarities and differences in the linguistic and terminological treatment of surgical topics in High and Low German. Moreover, the frequency and modality of the recourse to foreign (mainly Latin and Greek) specialized terminology in both Brunschwig’s original and in its Low German translation are taken into consideration.