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other means. 333 Instead, we must re-evaluate and reconsider the extent to which we think that
Trevisa’s translations, in the words of Traugott Lawler, wish to be “intelligible, idiomatic, and
accurate” ways of portraying concepts for his vernacular audiences. 334 To be sure, critics like
D.C. Greetham, A.S.G. Edwards, H.K. Kim, and Ronald Waldron have already noted that the
more Trevisa’s texts explicate the “substance” of their Latin originals, the less they appear to
negotiate the movement from Latin to English in a quotidian and “average” language for their
readers. 335 This is in part why the first detailed study of Trevisa’s translations, which was
conducted by Traugott Lawler, analyzed their ability to convey meaning clearly through their
idiomatic “failure” rather than successes at rendering Latinate concepts for the “average
educated” English reader. 336
Nevertheless, the general scholarly consensus does not think that the awkwardness and
foreignness of Trevisa’s English is a basic quality of his translating tactics. Instead, scholars tend
to interpret the not-so-clear passages in Trevisa’s works as the inevitable errors of a translator
who, like all translators, must decide between stylistic ease of his English and fidelity to his
Latinate content. 337 Trevisa’s texts are thus depicted as both legible to an audience and failthful
to their content only when the “everyday clarity” of their English portrays an accurate concept in
an ideal, linguistic space. In Ronald Waldron’s words, Trevisa’s “faithful translation proceeds
333 Rita Copeland, “Rhetoric and Vernacular Translation,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 (1989): 42.
334 Traugott Lawler, “On the Properties of John Trevisa’s Major Translations,” Viator, 14 (1983): 268.
335 D.C. Greetham mostly describes the English in Trevisa’s translations as full of neologisms or transliterations,
which scribes learn to understand imperfectly (“Models” 147-148). A.S.G Edwards lists the Rolls Series 1865
edition of the Polychronicon as well as H.K. Kim’s version of the Gospel of Nicodemus to support a similar
conclusion about Trevisa’s awkard use of English (A.S.G. Edwards, “John Trevisa,” Middle English Prose: A
Critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres, ed. A.S.G. Edwards (Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984) 139-
140). Ronald Waldron takes a more extreme approach, “In lexical usage, the ‘thew and sinew’ of the language is so
much in evidence that one is at times tempted to think of him as a linguistic purist, and I suppose he was in the sense
that he often seems to avoid an English cognate of a word in his Latin source, even if one was already current in the
language [… but] he is not averse to well-established French loan words” (Ronald Waldron, “John Trevisa and the
Use of English,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 74 (1988): 189).
336 Lawler 288.
337 Ibid. 270.
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