Proper Roman names in official Greek-language Roman documents: unveiling the identity of the translators

This article investigates the Greek rendering of proper roman names within the Greek-language Roman official documents produced during the Republican period. Through a detailed linguistic analysis of inscriptions from the second and first century BCE, the study explores the phono-orthographic features that emerge in the Greek transcriptions of Latin proper names. Even though the spellings of the names are not always phonetically transcribed, we can find cases of transgraphemization, in which some features can be interpreted as traces of the translators’ linguistic background. By comparing these linguistic phenomena with historical data on the Roman administrative personnel, the article argues that the translations were most likely executed by scribae attached to the aerarium Saturni, many of whom originated from central and southern Italy. The study further supports this claim by examining lexical choices in the translation of Roman institutional terms into Greek.