One wonders also how the source, thus chosen, presented itself to the
translator's conception. His references to it are generally vague or
confused, often positively misleading. Yet to designate with any
definiteness a French or Latin text was no easy matter. When one
considers the labor that, of later years, has gone to the classification
and identification of old manuscripts, the awkward elaboration of
nomenclature necessary to distinguish them, the complications resulting
from missing pages and from the undue liberties of copyists, one realizes
something of the position of the medieval translator. Even categories were
not forthcoming for his convenience. The religious legend of _St.
Katherine of Alexandria_ is derived from "chronicles";[35] the moral tale
of _The Incestuous Daughter_ has its source in "romance";[36]
Grosseteste's allegory, _The Castle of Love_, is presented as "a romance
of English ... out of a romance that Sir Robert, Bishop of Lincoln,
made."[37] The translator who explained "I found it written in old hand"
was probably giving as adequate an account of his source as truth would
permit.

Moreover, part of the confusion had often arisen before the manuscript
came into the hands of the English translator. Often he was engaged in
translating something that was already a translation. Most frequently it
was a French version of a Latin original, but sometimes its ancestry was
complicated by the existence or the tradition of Greek or Hebrew
sources. The medieval Troy story, with its list of authorities, Dictys,
Dares, Guido delle Colonne--to cite the favorite names--shows the
situation in an aggravated form. In such cases the earlier translator's
blunders and omissions in describing his source were likely to be
perpetuated in the new rendering.

Such, roughly speaking, were the circumstances under which the
translator did his work. Some of his peculiar difficulties are,
approached from another angle, the difficulties of the present-day
reader. The presence of one or more intermediary versions, a
complication especially noticeable in England as a result of the French
occupation after the Conquest, may easily mislead us. The originals of
many of our texts are either non-extant or not yet discovered, but in
cases where we do possess the actual source which the English writer
used, a disconcerting situation often becomes evident. What at first
seemed to be the English translator's comment on his own treatment