In Eco’s Experiences in translation, he makes a distinction between temporal and physical separation, and where a text can lie on that spectrum. That is, he explains that modernizing a more ancient text is not the same thing as domesticating it; an English translation of Dante can still be deeply ingrained in the Italian culture of the time while being written in plain, modern English prose. This separation seems to lie on a boundary of linguistic choices and culture. That is, modernizing a text would involve using language, in terms of syntax and lexicon, that would be more representative of modern day usage; domesticating a text would involve “translating” the culture, which could mean trying to find an equivalence to an idiom from the source text into the target text or modifying toponyms, names, or other proper nouns.
An example of domesticating a text can be found in Goffredo Raponi’s translation of Macbeth (1998). The translator identifies that all characters in the text whose names can be “Italianized,” such has been done. The character “Duncan” has become “Duncano.” All characters whose names are not easily adapted into Italian have variable stress depending on the needs of the verse. That is, Macbeth may be rendered with stress on the first or second syllable to fit the metric. To maintain all of the original names as they were would have been to foreignize the text.
An example of modernizing the text is found in Scene III. The Weird Sisters, as called in the English text, have become “le tre fatidiche sorelle.” Although nowadays, “weird” means “odd”, it was in Shakespeare’s time closer to Raponi’s choice “fatidiche,” to mean “fateful.” Raponi chose to represent this word with a modern Italian word, foregoing the idea to choose an equally ancient word to represent Shakespeare’s lexical intention. If he had chosen an older Italian word that modern readers wouldn’t immediately recognize, this would have been an example of keeping the text archaic.
An English reader would not be able to gloss, without prior knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon language from which the word’s original meaning came from or a footnote, Shakespeare’s intended meaning. However, the meaning that would come about due to the modern meaning of “weird” would still fit the context. Raponi modernizes the text in Italian in a way that isn’t immediately accessible to English readers reading the original text. One wonders if English continues to develop farther away from Shakespeare’s English, if a modern adaptation of his plays will be necessary, with similar lexical changes as is done for the Italian edition. These translations from an older variety to a modern variety has already been seen for texts like Beowulf, attempting to maintain the scholarly level of the text. As for Shakespeare, books like “No Fear Shakespeare” have worked to modernize the original text, but they are not accredited at a scholarly level.