Open Access

Transylvania was not exempt from the witch hunt of the 17th century; the city of Sibiu itself witnessed a series of trials and death sentences. While the phenomenon itself has been widely studied and written about in Western Europe, it has been scarcely mentioned in Romanian history works. The original documents from the Transylvanian archives, written down in German, have not been translated and presented to the Romanian public. The present paper intends to present aspects of the witch hunt in Sibiu during the 17th century starting from the case of a midwife judged and condemned to death by burning in 1692. This case will be presented through the original documents of the trial, found in the National Archives of Sibiu and containing the depositions of witnesses, of the accused herself, as well as the sentence passed. We hope that this will be the starting point for a selection and translation into Romanian of the German written documents, in order to make them available to the Romanian speaking public.

The study deals with two texts from the year 1654 that belong to the administrative and judicial documents of The Romanian National Archives in Sibiu. The translation of these documents into Romanian is very important from a historical and linguistic point of view as it reveals to the Romanian reader major aspects regarding the history of Transylvania and the evolution of the German language in this area in the 17th century. The translational analysis goes from Antoine Berman’s ethnocentric vs. ethical theory to Julianne House’s theory of the „overt translation”, process in which the translator decides on a combination of elements from both theories.

Not only in literature there are hunting vampyres. Especially in the history of eastern europe there are a few cases of this phenomena. But it is an phenomena of borders. Military borders, borders between faith and superstition and our common knowledge. In this paper I shall examine well-known sources of cases leading toward the an edict by Maria Theresia to force the end of this superstition. The sources show that there was an existing problem at the military borders of Austro-Hungary in the 18th century. When diseases came to a village and the legends about vampires were well-known there, than brave locals exhumed the body of a suspicious deceased. And they found a dead corpse in good shape. The skin had still a fresh colour. Hair and nails seemed grown and even blood was found between mouth and nose. These descriptions can be found in many sources of vampire exhumes in historical sources. But every exhume had a danger of infecting the whole society in a village if the deceased had a disease. Even if doctors and theologians examined the cases, there was never an intention to give a proof of vampyres. The phenomena of vampyres was part of a barbaric world – far away from vienna. Today's knowledge about decay of a human body shows that the descriptions in the sources are correct at this point. A body buried in a coffin still can be in a good shape. So the history of vampyres is a history of the culture transformation of legends and the history of science, to understand what happens after someone went down to his grave.

Starting from the current preoccupations of areal phraseology, this article presents directions and ways of researching the phraseological stock of the German language with regards to the particularities and to the area of circulation in dialects or in the standard variants of the German language.

Occasionally the Transylvanian Saxon thesaurus deals with terminology related to certain domains of agriculture. The following article deals with livestock enclosures, fencing erected in the fields for livestock, especially for sheep. The selected case samples are native terms with explanatory compounds, in addition there are terms borrowed mainly from Romanian, less so from Hungarian. The borrowings can mostly be assigned to sheep farming. This branch of agriculture was not familiar to the medieval immigrants, so they were not used to sheep farming. The breeding and herding of sheep was usually left to the Romanian population, the Saxons did not engage in it, even though they owned sheep. The Saxons were more inclined to cattle and pig farming. The terms are mainly extracted from the Transylvanian-Saxon Dictionary (SSWB), the Northern Transylvanian dictionary (NSSWB) as well as other specialized literature.