History of translation

The need for translation has existed since time immemorial and translating
Important literary works from one language into others has contributed
significantly to the development of world culture. Ideas and forms of one
culture have constantly moved and got assimilated into other cultures
through the works of translators. The history of translation is related to the
history of the often invisible cross cultural interactions of the world.

In Antiquity

The translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek in the 3rdcentury BCE is
regarded as the first major translation in the Weštéga world, Thedispersed
Jews had forgotten Hebrew, their ancestral language and needed hẹ Bible to
be translated into Greek to be able to read it. This translation s/known as the
“Septuagint”, a name that refers to the sèvènty.rarslators who were
commissioned to translate the Hebrew Bible in Alexandria, Egypt. Each
translator worked in solitary confinement in his own cell, and according to
legend all seventy versions proved identical. The “Septuagint” became the
source text for later translations into Latin, Coptic, Amenian, Georgian and
other languages. Related biblical texts in Hebrew were also translated into
Greek in Alexandria during the two following centuries.

The translator’s role as a bridge for “carrying across” values between

cultures has been discussed since Terence, a Roman playwright who adapted
Greek comedies into Roman in the 2nd century BCE. The debate relating to
sense-for-sense translation vs. Word-for-word translation also started around
that time. The coiner of the term “sense for sense” is said to be Jerome in his
“Letter to Pammachius”. While translating the Bible into Latin (later known as
the “Vulgate”), Jerome stated that the translator needed to translate “not
word for word but sense for sense”

Cicero, a prominent philosopher and writerm also famously cautioned

against translating “word for word” in “On the Orator” (“De Oratore”; 55
BCE): “I did not think I ought to count them [the words] out to the reader like
coins, but to pay them by weight, as it were”. Cicero was also a translator
from Greek to Latin, and compared the translator’s work to that of an artist.
 Large-scale translation efforts were also undertaken by the Arabs after they
conquered the Greek Empire, to offer Arabic versions of all major Greek
philosophical and scientific works.

In the Middle Ages

Latin was the lingua franca of the Western learned world throughout the
Middle Ages, and there were few translations of Latin works into vernacular
languages. In the 9th century, Alfred the Great, King of Wessex in England,
was far ahead of his time in commissioning translations from Latin into
English of two major works – Bede’s “Eccesiastical History” and Boethius’s
“The Consolation of philosophy” – which contributed to improve the
underdeveloped English prose of that time.

In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Toledo Şehool of Trànš}ațors (Escuela de
traductores de Toledo) became a meeting pbísrfot European scholars who -
Attracted by the high wages they were offered – traveled Arkd settled down
Toledo, Spain, to translate major philosophical, religious,ctetific and medical
works from Arabic, Greek and Hebrew into Latin änd Gastlián.

Roger Bacon, a 13th-century English scholar, was the first linguist to assess
that translator should have a thorough knowledge of both the source
language and the target language to produce a good translation, and that he
should also be well versed in the discipline of the work he was translating.

The first fine translations into English were produced by Geoffrey Chaucer in
the 14th century. Chaucer translated the “Roman de la Rosc” from French,
and Boethius’s works from Latin. He also adapted some works of the Italian
humanist Giovanni Boccaccio for his own “Knight’s Tale” and Troilus and
Criseyde” (c.1385) in English. Chaucer was the founder of an English poetic
tradition based on translations and adaptations of literary works in Latin and
Italian, two languages that were more “established” than English at the time.

The finest religious translation of that time was the “Wycliffe’s Bible” (1382-
84), named after John Wycliffe, the English theologian who translated the
Bible from Latin to English.
 In the 15th century

The trip of the Byzantine scholar Gemistus Pletho to Florence, Italy,

pioneered the revival of Greek learning in Western Europe. Pletho
reintroduced Plato’s thought during the 1438-39 Council of Florence, in a
failed attempt to reconcile the East-West schism (an 11th-century schism
between the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic churches). During this Council,
Pletho met Cosimo de Medici, the ruler of Florence and a great patron of
learning and the arts, and influenced him to found a Platonic Academy. Under
the leadership of the Italian scholar and translator Marsilio Ficino, the
Platonic Academy took over the translation into Latin of all Plato’s works, the
“Enneads” of Plotinus and other Neoplatonist works. Ficino’s work – and
Erasmus’ Latin edition of the New Testament – led to a new attitude to
translation. For the first time, readers demanded rigor of rendering, as
philosophical and religious beliefs depended on the exact words of plato and
Jesus (and Aristotle and others).

The great age of English prose translation began in the late 15th century
with Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur” (1485), a free
translation/adaptation of Arthurian romances about the legendary King
Arthur as well as Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin and the Knights of the Rtnd
Table Thomas Malory “interpreted” existing French and English störies about
these figures while adding original material, for example the “Gareth”stoyas,
gne of the Knights of the Round Table.

In the 16th century

Non-scholarly literature continued to rely on adaptation. France’s Pléiade,

England’s Tudor poets and the Elizabethan translators adapted themes by
Horacc, Ovid, Petrarch and modern Latin writers, while crcating a ncw poetic
style on those models. The English poets and translators wanted to supply a
new audience- created by the rise of a middle class and the development of
printing - with works such as the original authors would have written, had
they been writing in England in that day” (Wikipedia).

The “Tyndale New Testament” (1525) is considered the first great Tudor
translation, named after william Tyndale, the English scholar who was its
main translator. This translation was also the first Bible translation to work
directly from Hebrew and Greek texts. After translating the whole New
Testament, Tyndale went on with the Old Testament and translated half of it.
Tyndale also became a leading figure in Protestant Reformation before
receiving a death sentence for an unlicensed possession of Scripture in
English. The “Tyndale Bible” was completed by one of Tyndale’s assistants. It
became the first mass produced English translation as a result of new
advances in the art of printing. Martin Luther, a German professor of
theology, was a seminal figure in the protestant Reformation, and translated
the Bible into German in his later life. He was the first Europcan to assess
that one translates satisfactorily only toward his own language, a bold
statement that became the norm two centuries later. The publication of the
“Luther Bible” also contributed significantly to the development of the
modern German language.

Along with the “Luther Bible” in German (in 1522 -34), two other major
translations were the “Jakub Wujck Bible” (“Biblia Jakuba Wujka”) in Polish (in
1535) and the “King James Bible” in English (in 1604-11), with lasting effects
on the religion, language and culture of the respective countries. The
disparities in crucial words and passages contributed to some extent to the
split of Western Christianity into Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, on
top of the protestant Reformation’s goal to eliminate corruption in the Roman
Catholic Church.

During the same period, the Bible was also translated into Dutch, French,
Spanish, Czech and Slovene. The Bible in Dutch was published in 1526 by
Jacob van Lisevelt. The Bible in French was published in 528 by Jacques
Lefevre d’Étaples (Jacobus Faber Stapulensis). The Bible in Spanish (“Biblia
Del oso”) was published in 1569 by Casiodorode Reina, The Biple in Slovene
was published in 1584 by Jurij Dalmatn. The Bible in CzecherBble kralická”)
was a collective work printed between 1579 and 593.

All these translations were a driving force in the use of vemacuar languages
in Christian Europe, and contributed to the development of modern European
Languages.

In the 17th century

The Spanish novelist Cervantes, famously known all over Europe for his “Don
Quixote” (1605-15), expressed his own opinion on the translation process by
offering a rather despairing metaphor for the end result of translations.
According to Cervantes, translations of his time – with the exception of those
made from Greek into Latin – were like looking at a Flemish tapestry by its
reverse side. While the main figures of a Flemish tapestry could be
discerned, they were obscured by the loose threads and lack the clarity of
the front side.

In the second half of the 17th century, the English poet and translator John
Dryden sought to make Virgil speak “in words such as he would probably
have written if he were living as an Englishman”. But Dryden discerned no
need to emulate thc Roman poct’s subtlety and concision. On the contrary,
Alexander Pope, a contemporary translator, reduced Homer’s wild paradise”
to “order” in his translation of the Greck epic poct’s work into English.
Dryden also cautioned against the license of imitation” in adapted
translation: “When a Painter copies from the life.. he has no privilege to alter
featurcs and lineaments..”, while observing that “translation is a type of
drawing after life…”, thus comparing the translator with an artist a few
centuries after Cicero.

During the second half of the 17th century, “faithfulness” and

“transparency” were better defined as dual ideals in translation, while often
being at odds. “Faithfulness” is the extent to which a translation accurately
renders the meaning of the source text, without distortion, while taking into
account the text itself (subjcct, type and usc), its literary qualitics and its
social or historical context. “Transparency” is the extent to whicha translation
appears to a native speaker of the target language to have originally been
written in that language, and conforms to its grammar, syntax and idiom. A
“transparent” translation is often qualified as “idiomatic”.

In the 18th century

According to Johann Gottfried Herder, a German philosopher, theologian,

poet and translator, a translator should translate toward (and not from) his
own language, a statenment already expressed two centuries earlier by
Martin Luther, who was the first European scholar to assess that one
translates satisfactorily only toward his own language.
But there was still not much concern for/ accuracy. “Thrughout the 18th
Century, the watchword of translators was case 8reading, Whatever they did
not understand in a text, or thought might bore readers, héy omitted. They
cheerfully assumed that their own style of expresjon was thebest, and that
text should be made to conform to it in translation. Evensfor-séhelarship,
except for the translation of the Bible, they cared no more than had their
predecessors, and did not shrink from making translations from languages
they hardly knew.’

It was also asscsscd that no dictionary or thesaurus could cver be a fully

adequate guide for translating. In his “Essay on the Principles of Translation”
(1791), the Scottish historian Alexander Tytler emphasized that assiduous
reading is a more comprehensive guide to a language than are dictionaries.
The Polish poet and grammarian Onufry Andrzej Kopczyński made the same
point a few years earlier, in 1783, while adding the listening to the spoken
language to the assiduous reading.

The Polish encyclopedist Ignacy Krasicki described the translator’s special

role in society in his posthumous essay “O thumaczeniu ksiąg (On Translating
Books, 1803). Ignacy Krasicki was the author of the first Polish novel, as well
as poet and fabulist (often named Poland’s La Fontaine) and a translator from
French and Greek into Polish. In this essay, he wrote that translation… is in
fact an art both estimable and very difficult, and therefore is not the labor
and portion of common minds; [it) should be [practiced] by those who are
themselves capable of being actors, when they see greater use in translating
the works of others than in their own works, and hold higher than their own
glory the service that they render their country”.

In the 19th century

The 19th century brought new standards for accuracy and style. In regard to
accuracy, as observed by J.M. Cohen, the author of the “Translation” entry in
the “Encyclopedia Americana” (1986, vol. 27), the policy became the text,
the whole text, and nothing but the text” (cxccpt for bawdy passages), with
the addition of extensive explanatory footnotes. In regard to style, the
Victorians to constantly remind readers that they were reading a foreign
classic.

An exception was the outstanding translation of Persian poems by the

English writer and poet Edward FitzGerald. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám”
(1859) offered a selection of poems by Omar Khayyám (1048-1131), who
was also a mathematician and astronomer. FitzGerald’s translation actually
drew little of its material from the Persian original poems, but it has stayed
the first and most famous translation of Khayyám’s pocms to this day,
despite more recent and accurate translations.

The “non-transparent” translation theory/was first developed by German

theologian and- philosopher Friedrichséhleiemacher during German
Romanticism, before becoming a mainstreang theory twơ ceturies later. In
his seminal lecture “On the Different Methods of Ayánslating” (1813),
Schleiermacher distinguished between translationmetbods hát move “the
writer toward [the reader]”, i.e. transparency, and those that move the
reader toward [the author], i.e. an extreme fidelity to the foreignness of the
source text. Schleiernmacher favored the latter approach. His distinction
between “domestication” (bringing the author to the reader) and
“foreignization” (taking the reader to the author) inspired prominent theorists
in the 20th century, for Example Antoine Berman and Lawrence Venuti.

Yan Fu, a Chinese scholar and translator, developed in 1898 his three-facet
theory of translation: faithfulness, ie. Be true to the original in spirit;
Expressiveness, i.e. be accessible to the target reader; and elegance, i.e. be
in the language the target reader accepts as being educated. Yan Fu’s theory
of translation was based on his experience with translating works of social
sciences from English into Chinese. Of the three facets, he considered the
second as the most important. If the meaning of the translated text is not
accessible to the reader, there is no difference between having translated
the text and not having translated the text at all. According to Yan Fu, in
order to facilitate comprehension, the word order should be changed,
Chinese examples may replace English ones, and even people’s names
should be rendered Chinese. His theory had much impact worldwide, but was
also sometimes wrongly extended to the translation of literary works.

In the 20th century

Aniela Zagórska, a Polish translator, rendered into Polish nearly all the works
of the Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad, who wrote all his works in
English. In Conrad’s view, translation, like other arts, inescapably involved
choice, and choice implicd interpretation. Conrad would later advise Anicla
Zagórska (who was his niece): “Don’t trouble to be too scrupulous… I may
tell you that in my opinion it is better to interpret than to translate… It is,
then, a qucestion of finding the equivalent expressions. And there, my dear, I
beg you to let yourself be guided more by your temperament than by a strict
conscience” (cited in Zdzislaw Najder, “Joseph Conrad: A Life”, 2007).

Jorge Luis Borges, a famous Argentine short-story writer, essayist and poet,
was also a notable translator of literary works from Engtişh, French, German,
Old English or Old Norse into Spanish. He translateć-while shyultaneously
subty transforming – the works of William Faulkņer André Gide, Hermann
Hesse, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Po. Wal Whisman Virginia
Woolf and others. Borges also wrote and lectured extehsively on the art of
translation, holding that a translation may improve upon the original,
maygven be unfaithful to it, and that alternative and potentially contradhetor
Jenderings of the work can be equally valid.

Other translators still consciously produced literal translations, for example

translators of religious, historic, academic and scientific texts, who often
adhered as closely as possible to the source text, sometimes stretching the
limits of the target language to produce an unidiomatic text.

The second half of the 20th century saw the birth of a new discipline called
“Translation Studies” as well as the creation of new institutes specializing in
teaching it. The term “Translation Studies” was coined by James S. Holmes, a
poet and translator of poetry, in his seminal paper “The Name and Nature of
Translation Studies” (1972), regarded as the foundational statement for this
new discipline. Bom in the United States, Holmes moved permanently to
Amsterdam, Netherlands, as a young man. While writing his own poetry, he
translated many works from Dutch and Belgian poets into English. He was
hired as an associate professor in the new Institute of Interpreters and
Translators (later renamed the Institute of Translation Studies) created in
1964 within the University of Amsterdam, and also wrote a number of
influential articles about translation.
From Antiquity to the mid-20th century, interpreting was only seen as a
sppecialized form of translation – spoken instead of written before becoming
a separate discipline. Interpreting Studies gradually emancipated from
Translation Studies in order to concentrate on the practical and pedagogical
aspect of interpreting. It also developed a different interdisciplinary
theoretical framework including sociological studies of interpreters and their
working conditions while such studies are still sorely lacking for translators to
this day.

In the 21st century

Translation Studies is now an academic interdiscipline that includes many

fields of study (comparative literature, computer science, history, linguistics,
Philology,. Philosophy, semiotics, terminology), with the need for translators
to choose a specialty (legal, economic, technical, scientific or literary
translation) in order to be trained accordingly.

The internet has fostered a worldwide market for translation services, for
language localization and for translation softwatet has also brought many
issues, with precarious employment for some rańslators, with scarce
freelance work and lower fees for other translators, and/with the,rise of
unpaid volunteer translation- including crowdsourced trarlslatjon promoted
by major organizations that have the necessary funds to hife many
professionals.. but no professional translators.

Despite the omnipresent MT (machine translation) and CAT (computer-

assisted hTranslation) tools that are supposed to speed up the translation
process, some translators still want to be compared to artists, not only for
the precarious life they have, but also for the craft, knowledge, dedication
and passion they put into their work.

References :

-Amparo Hurtado Albir. “La notion de fidélité en traduction” (The ldea of

Faithfulness in Translation). Didier Érudition, Paris. 1990
-Bassnett-McGuire, S.. Translation Studies. London: Routledge. 1980

- Chomsky, Noam, Syntactic Structures. The Hague .Paris: Mouton. 1957.

- Eugene A. Nida & Charles R. Taber. “The Theory and Practice of Translation,
With Special Reference to Bible Translating”. Brill, Leiden. 1969.

-Nida, E.A. “Approaches to Translating in the Western World”. In Foreign

Language Teaching and Research. 1984

-Ghazala, Hassan. Translation as Problems and Solutions: A Course Book for

University Students and Trainee Translators. &th ed. Malta: Elga 2008

-JM. Cohen. “Translation “. In “Encyclopedia Americana”. Grolier, New York,

vol. 27. 1986

-James S. Holmes. “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies”. In

“Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies’”. Rodopi,
Amsterdam, 1972-88.

-Jean Delisle & Judith Woodsworth.”Translators through History”. John

Benjamins, Amsterdam.2012

-Jean-Paul Vinay and J. Darbelnet, Stylistique comparée du français et de

L’anglais. Paris.

- Jeremy Munday, Introducing translation Studies. Routledge 2008.

-Louis G. Kelly. “The True Interpreter. 4 History of Lranslation Theory and

Practice in the West”. St. Martin ‘s Press, Ne Yo97

-Mona Baker & Gabriela Saldanha. “Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation

Studies” (2nd edition). Routledge, London. 2009

-Peter Newmark, A Textbook of Translation New York: Prentice Hall,. 1988.

-Roman Jakobston. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”. Essay. 1959

 The Holmes/Toury ‘map’

It explains that which are the areas that fall under translation studies
according to Holmes.

When and where:

A seminal paper in the development of the field as a distinct discipline was

James S. Holmes’s ‘The name and nature of translation studies’. In his
Contemporary Translation Theories, Gentzler describes Holmes’s paper as
‘generally accepted as the founding statement for the field.’

Snell-Hornby agrees. Interestingly, in view of our discussion above of how

the field evolved from other disciplines, the published version was an
expanded form of a paper Holmes originally gave in 1972 in the translation
section of the Third International Congress of Applied Linguistics in
Copenhagen.

Crucially, Holmes puts forward an overall framework, describing what

translation studies covers. This framework was subsequently presented by
the leading Israeli translation scholar Gideon Toury as in Figure.
 Pure Branch

In Holmes’s explanations of this framework the objectives of the ‘pure’ areas

of research are:

(1)The description of the phenomena of translation;

(2)The establishment of general principles to explain and predict such

phenomena (translation theory).

Descriptive branch

The descriptive branch of ‘pure’ research in Holmes’s map is known as

descriptive translation studies (DTS). It may examine: 1. The product; (2) the
function; and (3) the process.

(1)Product-oriented DTS examines existing translations. This can involve the

description or analysis of a single ST–TT pair or a comparative analysis of
several TTs of the same ST (into one or more TLs). These smaller-scale
studies can build up into a larger body of translation analysis looking at a
specific period, language or text/discourse type.

Examples would be translation in the twenty-first century, in the English<

>Chinese language pair, or of scientific reports. Larger-scale studies can be
either diachronic (following development over time) or synchronic (at a
single point or period in time).

(2) Function-oriented DTS, means the description of the ‘function [of

translations] in the recipient sociocultural situation: it is a study of
contexts rather than texts’. Issues that may be researched include which
texts were translated when and where, and the influences that were
exerted.

For example, the study of the translation and reception of Shakespeare into
European languages, or the subtitling of contemporary cartoon films into
Arabic. Holmes terms this area ‘socio-translation studies’.
(3)Process-oriented DTS in Holmes’s framework is concerned with the
psychology of translation, i.e. it is concerned with trying to find out what
happens in the mind of a translator. Work from a cognitive perspective
includes think-aloud protocols (where recordings are made of translators’
verbalization of the translation process as they translate).

The results of DTS research can be fed into the theoretical branch to evolve
either a general theory of translation or, more likely, partial theories of
translation ‘restricted’ according to the subdivisions.

Theoretical branch

The ‘theoretical’ branch is divided into general and partial theories:

1.General

By ‘general’, Holmes is referring to those writings that seek to describe or

account for every type of translation and to make generalizations that will be
relevant for translation as a whole.

2.Partial

‘Partial’ theoretical studies are restricted according to the parameters

discussed below (medium, text-type, etc.).

Medium-restricted theories subdivide according to translation by

machine and humans, with further subdivisions according to whether
the machine/ computer is working alone (automatic machine
translation) or as an aid to the human translator (computer-assisted
translation), to whether the human translation is written or spoken and
to whether spoken translation (interpreting) is consecutive or
simultaneous.

Area-restricted theories are restricted to specific languages or groups

of languages and/or cultures. Holmes notes that language-restricted
theories (e.g. for the Japanese< >English pair) are closely related to
work in contrastive linguistics and stylistics.
 Rank-restricted theories are linguistic theories that have been
restricted to a level of (normally) the word or sentence. At the time
Holmes was writing, there was already a trend towards text linguistics,
i.e. analysis at the level of the text, which has since become far more
popular.

Text-type restricted theories look at discourse types and genres; e.g.

literary, business and technical translation. Text-type approaches came
to prominence with the work of Reiss and Vermeer, among others, in
the 1970s.

Time-restricted is self-explanatory, referring to theories and

translations limited according to specific time frames and periods. The
history of translation falls into this category.

Problem-restricted theories can refer to certain problems such as

equivalence (a key issue that came to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s)
or to a wider question of whether so-called ‘universals’ of translation
exist.

Applied branch

The ‘applied’ branch of Holmes’s framework concerns applications to the

practice of translation:

Translator training: teaching methods, testing techniques, curriculum

design;

Translation aids: such as dictionaries and grammars;

Translation criticism: the evaluation of translations, including the marking

of student translations and the reviews of published translations.

Translation policy : Another area Holmes mentions is translation policy,

where he sees the translation scholar advising on the place of translation in
society. This should include what place, if any, it should occupy in the
language teaching and learning curriculum.

Drawbacks

There are drawbacks to the structure. The divisions in the ‘map’ as a whole
are in many ways artificial, and Holmes himself points out that the
theoretical, descriptive and applied areas do influence one another. The main
merit of the divisions is, as Toury states that they allow a clarification and a
division of labor between the various areas of translation studies which, in
the past, have often been confused. The divisions are still flexible enough to
incorporate developments such as the technological advances of recent
years.