Interferenssi ja transferenssi vanhoissa virsikäännöksissä

Throughout history, translation has been among the most important methods for creating a new, standardized written language. Translating from various source languages has provided tools for shaping the grammatical structures and lexical norms of the target language. On the other hand, the transfer process has unavoidably resulted in SL interferences on the morphological, syntactic or lexical levels. Interference was probably particularly common when the target language lacked standardization, which was the case with the early translations of Christian texts such as Biblical and liturgical texts and hymns. In this paper, the author analyzes a 4th- century Latin hymn, Te Deum laudamus by Ambrosius, and its eight Finnish and five German translations from the 16th through the 20th centuries, as well as one Swedish translation from the 16th century. The aim is to discover whether there were cases of the different types of interference in the oldest translations that were subsequently reformulated in the retranslations. If SL interference was still present in the retranslations, it was further investigated whether the linguistic phenomena concerned have become part of standardized target language as transference, or whether they have only been preserved in the hymns to give them an archaic touch.