"Notes on Translation," an Addendum to My Essay, "Thomas Hobbes: Magnanimity, Felicity, and Justice."
Harold Whitmore Jones frequently chooses to translate "foelicitas" as "happiness," rather than as "felicity." Yet Hobbes is discussing the same notion of "felicitas" that he addresses in his Latin Leviathan and calls "felicity" in his English Leviathan.
Jones frequently translates "potentia" as "potential" rather than as "power." Yet, in his Latin Leviathan, Hobbes translates his English Leviathan's phrase "the power of a man" (1, see references below) as "potentia cujusque" (2). When Hobbes, in Chapter 11, relates felicity to power, he once again uses the word "potentia."
Jones translates the phrase "inanis gloria" in different ways in different contexts. He frequently translates it as "empty glory," sometimes as "pride," and at least once as "a worthless self-glorification." Hobbes, himself, seems to consistently understand his term "vain glory" in the English Leviathan as "inanis gloria" in the Latin Leviathan. In my translations of Critique du 'De Mundo', I have deliberately chosen to leave it as "empty glory."
In The Elements of Law, Hobbes distinguishes "false glory" from "vain glory" (3). A person experiences false glory when he imagines himself to be more powerful than he is because of flattery, and a person experiences vain glory when he imagines himself to be better than he is based on fictions. In Critique du 'De Mundo', Hobbes doesn't make this distinction, and refers to both kinds of glory as "inanis". It isn't clear if we should take Hobbes to contradict The Elements of Law, and claim that both are vain glory. What is obvious is that Hobbes means to distinguish these kinds of glory - which are empty and useless - from well grounded glory, which is conducive to felicity.
My last several notes are specific to one particular passage and translation:
Est itaque gaudium, sive delectatio animi nihil aliud quàm triumphus quidam animi, seu interna gloria, vel gloriatio eius de potentia & excellentia propria respectu alterius qui cum se comparat.
And so joy, or the delight of the mind, is nothing other than a certain triumph of mind, or an internal glory, or gloriation about his own power and excellence with respect to another with whom he compares himself (4).
My translation differs substantially from Jones' translation, not just in word choice, but also in content. Jones chooses to translate "Gloria" as "pride," and so, by his translation, any difference between glory and pride is lost. I believe this distinction is of key importance.
Further, my translation preserves several similarities between Hobbes' Critique Du 'De Mundo,' Leviathan, and Elements of Law: Natural and Politic. Consider the following two examples:
GLORY, or internal gloriation or triumph of the mind, is that passion which proceedeth from the imagination or conception of our power, above the power of him that contendeth with us (5).
"Joy, arising from imagination of a mans own power and ability, is that exultation of the mind which is called GLORYING" (6).
(1) Hobbes, Leviathan, I.10, 41.
(2) Hobbes, Opera Philosophica, I.11, 68.
(3) Hobbes, The Elements of Law, I.9.1, 28-29.
(4) Hobbes, Critique Du 'De Mundo', XXXVIII.7, 417. Jones, Thomas White's, XXXVIII.7, 466.
(5) Hobbes, The Elements of Law, I.9.1, 28.
(6) Hobbes, Leviathan, I.6, 26-27.