In textual scholarship, transmission is the process, through which a text has been transmitted to the public. Transmission can take place through a number of different media, e.g. through copying by hand, printing, electronic media, or orally, normally by reproducing the contents of the text more or less faithfully. It comprises all different stages of disseminating the text and its contents, starting from the original text of the author(s), as well as all the copies and versions of the text, be they extant or not. Hence, transmission has both historical and geographical aspects. One popular way to visualise transmission is to draw a stemma describing the relationships between extant witnesses of the text.
In other languages
DE: Überlieferung
FR: transmission
IT: trasmissione