The history of translation

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Ministry of Education and Youth,

Moldova State University, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures,

Department of Translation, Interpreting and Applied Linguistics

Report

Theme : The History of Translation

Submitted by

Cupcenco Eleonora

Group 261L

Research Advisor

Bodean

Senior Lecturer MA in

European Studies

Chisinau

2010

 Contents

Introduction

1. Chapter I. Antiquity

2. Chapter II. Middle Ages till today

2.1 Translation development

2.2 Hystory of Theory

Conclusion

Bibliography

 Introduction

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. So what is translation? Dryden defines it like a "judicious blending of metaphrase and paraphrase" when selecting, in the target language, "counterparts", or equivalents, for the expressions used in the source language. When we talk about the history of translation, we should think of the theories and names that emerged at its different periods. In fact, each era is characterized by specific changes in translation history, but these changes differ from one place to another. For example, the developments of translation in the western world are not the same as those in the Arab world, as each nation knew particular incidents that led to the birth of particular theories.Perhaps the best documented example of translation history is that of the Bible, but the work of scholars and great thinkers from all over the world has also been translated. These translations have permitted the cross-germination and exposure to ideas and values that have then spread across the world because of their availability in other languages. This report consist of 2 chapters as follows : Antiquity, Middle ages till today, Translation development , History of theory. It will describe and analyze the theories and the development of the translation as a reality more and more met nowadays.

Chapter I. Antiquity

For centuries, people believed in the relation between translation and the story of the tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis. According to the Bible, the descendants of Noah decided, after the great flood, to settle down in a plain in the land of Shinar. There, they committed a great sin. Instead of setting up a society that fits God's will, they decided to challenge His authority and build a tower that could reach Heaven. However, this plan was not completed, as God, recognizing their wish, regained control over them through a linguistic stratagem. He caused them to speak different languages so as not to understand each other. Then, he scattered them allover the earth. After that incident, the number of languages increased through diversion, and people started to look for ways to communicate, hence the birth of translation^[1] . Actually, with the birth of translation studies and the increase of research in the domain, people started to get away from this story of Babel, and they began to look for specific dates and figures that mark the periods of translation history. Researchers mention that writings on translation go back to the Romans. Eric Jacobson claims that translating is a Roman invention (see McGuire: 1980) ^[2]. In the first century BC Cicero (the Roman philosopher) and Horace (the leading Roman lyric poet) were the first theorists who distinguished between word-for-word translation and sense-for-sense translation. Their comments on translation practice influenced the following generations of translation up to the twentieth century. The early translations used in Arabic are dated back to the time of Syrians (the first half of the 2nd century AD), who translated into Arabic a large heritage that belongs to the era of paganism (Bloomshark 1921: 10-12, by Addidaoui, 2000)^[3] . Syrians were influenced in their translations by the Greek ways of translation. Syrian's translations were more literal and faithful to the original (Ayad 1993: 168, qtd by Addidaoui, 2000)^[4]. According to Addidaoui, Jarjas was one of the best Syrian translators; his famous Syrian translation of Aristotle's book In The World was very faithful and close to the original. Additionally, the time of the prophet Mohamed (peace be upon him) is of paramount importance for translation history. The spread of Islam and the communication with non-Arabic speaking communities as Jews, Romans and others pushed the prophet to look for translators and to encourage the learning of foreign languages. One of the most famous translators of the time is Zaid Ibnu Thabet, who played a crucial role in translating letters sent by the prophet to foreign kings of Persia, Syria, Rome and Jews, and also letters sent by those kings to the prophet. One of the first recorded instances of translation in the West was the rendering of the Old Testament into Greek in the third century B.C.E. The resulting translation is known as the Septuagint, a name that alludes to the seventy translators (seventy-two in some versions) who were commissioned to translate the Bible in Alexandria. Each translator worked in solitary confinement in a separate cell, and legend has it that all seventy versions were identical. The Septuagint became the source text for later translations into many languages, including Latin, Coptic, Armenian and Georgian.

 Chapter II. Middle Ages till today

2.1 Translation development

translation history theory

Ideas and concepts from the East notably India, China and Iraq have influenced the Western culture since as early as sixth century B.C. when trade ties were first established between India and the Mediterranean countries. Many medical theories of Plato and Galen of Greece had considerable influence from those of India. Many of the philosophical and scientific works of ancient Greece were rendered into Arabic as early as ninth century A.D. This knowledge spread to Europe via Spain which was a predominantly a Muslim country then. The school of translators of Toledo in Spain established by Alfonso VI of Castile and Leon in 1085 AD was responsible for translations from Arabic to Latin and then to Spanish these scientific and technological work which later led to the European Renaissance. Translators have enabled Holy Scriptures like the Bible written in esoteric languages like Latin to be understood by ordinary people by translating them into more common languages without depending on a few elite priests or the members of clergy to explain what they contained. Some translators even had to pay with their life for doing it like the famous Bible translators Willaim Tyndale who was arrested and executed in Holland by the king in 1536 for translating the Bible from its original languages into the common vernacular of English. Chinese monk Xuanzang is supposed to have translated 74 volumes of Buddhist scriptures originating from India into Chinese in 645 AD. One of the earliest recorded translations of considerable effort in English is perhaps the translation of the Bible around 1100 AD. Later on, the translation of the Bible remained subject to many conflicts between western theories and ideologies of translation for more than a thousand years. Moreover, these conflicts on Bible translation were intensified with the coming of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, when "translation came to be used as a weapon in both dogmatic and political conflicts as nation states began to emerge and the centralization of the Church started to weaken evidence in linguistic terms by the decline of Latin as a universal language." (McGuire, 1980) )^[5] .

In Arabic translations a significant role played the translation of the Holy Koran. According to Ben Chakroun (2002)^[6] , the early translators of the Koran focused on its meaning. Salman El Farisi, for instance, translated the meaning of Surat Al Fatiha for Persian Muslims, who didn't speak Arabic. Ben Chakroun (2002) )^[7] states that Western libraries still preserve many translations of the Koran, and that some of them such as the Greek translation of the philosopher Naktis belong to the third century (BC). Besides, the Holy Koran received a special interest from the translators. It was translated into Persian by Sheikh Mohamed Al-Hafid Al-Boukhari and into Turkish language by Sheikh Al-Fadl Mohamed Ben Idriss Al-Badlissi. Despite the proliferation of the Koran translations, this matter was and is still the point of many debates and conflicts in the Arab world. An example of these conflicts occurs after the translation of the Koran into Turkish language by the Turkish government in the time of Mustapha Kamal Ataturk.

In the eighteenth century, the translator was compared to an artist with a moral duty both to the work of the original author and to the receiver. Moreover, with the enhancement of new theories and volumes on translation process, the study of translation started to be systematic; Alexander Frayer Tayler's volume Principles of Translation (1791) is a case in point.

British translator Constance Garnett made the translating community proud through her brilliant translations of Russian classics including those of Turgenev, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoyevski in late 19^th century. Another famous translator is Gregory Rabassa who has translated many Latin American fictions into English. Dr. Arthur Waley is one of the world's foremost translators of the twentieth century of Chinese and Japanese literature into English. More recently Gladys Yang translated many Chinese classics into English over the last 50 years.

In the second half of the twentieth century, studies on translation became an important course in language teaching and learning at schools. What adds to its value is the creation of a variety of methods and models of translation. For instance, the grammar-translation method studies the grammatical rules and structures of foreign languages. The cultural model is also a witness for the development of translation studies in the period. It required in translation not only a word-for-word substitution, but also a cultural understanding of the way people in different societies think (Mehrach, 1977) ^[8] . With this model, we can distinguish between the ethnographical-semantic method and the dynamic equivalent method. Another model that appears in the period is text-based translation model, which focuses on texts rather than words or sentences in translation process. This model includes a variety of sub-models: the interpretative model, the text linguistic model and models of translation quality assessments that in turn provide us with many models such as those of Riess, Wilss, Koller, House, North and Hulst.

The period is also characterized by pragmatic and systematic approach to the study of translation. The most famous writings and figures that characterize the twenties are those of Jean-Paul Vinay and Darbelnet, who worked on a stylistic comparative study of French and English (1958), Alfred Malblanc (1963), George Mounin (1963), John C. Catford. (1965), Eugene Nida (1964), who is affected by the Chomskyan generative grammar in his theories of translation, De Beaugrand who writes a lot about translation, and many others who worked and still work for the development of the domain.

Nowadays, translation research started to take another path, which is more automatic. The invention of the internet, together with the new technological developments in communication and digital materials, has increased cultural exchanges between nations. This leads translators to look for ways to cope with these changes and to look for more practical techniques that enable them to translate more and waste less. They also felt the need to enter the world of cinematographic translation, hence the birth of audiovisual translation. The latter technique, also called screen translation, is concerned with the translation of all kinds of TV programs, including films, series, and documentaries. This field is based on computers and translation software programs, and it is composed of two methods: dubbing and subtitling. In fact, audiovisual translation marks a changing era in the domain of translation.

2.2 Hystory of Theory

Discussions of the theory and practice of translation reach back into antiquity and show remarkable continuities. The distinction that had been drawn by the ancient Greeks between metaphrase ("literal" translation) and paraphrase was adopted by the English poet and translator John Dryden (1631-1700), who represented translation as the judicious blending of these two modes of phrasing when selecting, in the target language, "counterparts", or equivalents, for the expressions used in the source language:

When [words] appear... literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed. But since... what is beautiful in one [language] is often barbarous, nay sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author's words: 'tis enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate the sense.^[9]

Dryden cautioned, however, against the license of "imitation", i.e. of adapted translation: "When a painter copies from the life... he has no privilege to alter features and lineaments..."

This general formulation of the central concept of translation -- equivalence -- is probably as adequate as any that has been proposed ever since Cicero and Horace, in first-century-BCE Rome, famously and literally cautioned against translating "word for word" (verbum pro verbo).^[10]

Despite occasional theoretical diversities, the actual practice of translators has hardly changed since antiquity. Except for some extreme metaphrasers in the early Christian period and the Middle Ages, and adapters in various periods (especially pre-Classical Rome, and the 18th century), translators have generally shown prudent flexibility in seeking equivalents -- "literal" where possible, paraphrastic where necessary -- for the original meaning and other crucial "values" (e.g., style, verse form, concordance with musical accompaniment or, in films, with speech articulatory movements) as determined from context. ^[10]

In general, translators have sought to preserve the context itself by reproducing the original order of sememes, and hence word order -- when necessary, reinterpreting the actual grammatical structure. The grammatical differences between "fixed-word-order" languages[10] (e.g., English, French, German) and "free-word-order" languages[11] (e.g., Greek, Latin, Polish, Russian) have been no impediment in this regard.^[10] When a target language has lacked terms that are found in a source language, translators have borrowed them, thereby enriching the target language. Thanks in great measure to the exchange of calques and loanwords between languages, and to their importation from other languages, there are few concepts that are "untranslatable" among the modern European languages. ^[10]

Generally, the greater the contact and exchange that has existed between two languages, or between both and a third one, the greater is the ratio of metaphrase to paraphrase that may be used in translating between them. However, due to shifts in "ecological niches" of words, a common etymology is sometimes misleading as a guide to current meaning in one or the other language. The English actual, for example, should not be confused with the cognate French actuel (meaning "present", "current"), the Polish aktualny ("present", "current")^[13] or the Russian актуальный ("urgent, topical").

The translator's role as a bridge for "carrying across" values between cultures has been discussed at least since Terence, Roman adapter of Greek comedies, in the second century BCE. The translator's role is, however, by no means a passive and mechanical one, and so has also been compared to that of an artist. The main ground seems to be the concept of parallel creation found in critics as early as Cicero. Dryden observed that "Translation is a type of drawing after life..." Comparison of the translator with a musician or actor goes back at least to Samuel Johnson's remark about Alexander Pope playing Homer on a flageolet, while Homer himself used a bassoon. If translation be an art, it is no easy one. In the 13th century, Roger Bacon wrote that if

a translation is to be true, the translator must know both languages, as well as the science that he is to translate; and finding that few translators did, he wanted to do away with translation and translators altogether.

The first European to assume that one translates satisfactorily only toward his own language may have been Martin Luther, translator of the Bible into German. According to L.G. Kelly, since Johann Gottfried Herder in the 18th century, "it has been axiomatic" that one works only toward his own language.

Compounding these demands upon the translator is the fact that not even the most complete dictionary or thesaurus can ever be a fully adequate guide in translation. Alexander Tytler, in his Essay on the Principles of Translation (1790), emphasized that assiduous reading is a more comprehensive guide to a language than are dictionaries. The same point, but also including listening to the spoken language, had earlier been made in 1783 by Onufry Andrzej Kopczynski, member of Poland's Society for Elementary Books, who was called "the last Latin poet".^[11]

The special role of the translator in society is aptly described in an essay that was published posthumously in 1803 and that had been written by Ignacy Krasicki -- "Poland's La Fontaine", Primate of Poland, poet, encyclopedist, author of the first Polish novel, and translator from French and Greek:

" 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 to their country.

In short, translation has a very wide and rich history in the West. Since its birth, translation was the subject of a variety of research and conflicts between theorists. Each theorist approaches it according to his viewpoint and field of research, the fact that gives its history a changing quality.

 Conclusion

Translation has played a role throughout history any time there has been an intersection of two cultures and languages. And each time one culture has produced a written text, translators serve as the bridge that allows literate members of one culture to be exposed to the written material the other has produced. A lot of scholars and translators made their contribution in the progress and developing of translation ,however, a lot of them ,especially ancient translators, have often remained unknown or in the background and the credit due to them have not been acknowledged. They have done their job with painstaking efforts despite many violent conflicts that have dotted throughout history. Because of skilled translators and their ability to bridge two languages, today we have access to texts as varied as the richly detailed novels of Walter Scott, Victor Hugo and of others gratest writers , scholarly articles, instruction manuals, and pamphlets for non-native Romanian or other languages speakers about health resources. Each of these examples are made possible because of the craft of translation whose history dates back to the first intersection of two cultures with written texts. To sum up, translation history is rich in inventions and theories. Each era is characterized by the appearance of new theorists and fields of research in translation. It is true that the western history of translation is larger and rich in proportion to that of the Arabs, but we should not deny that the translation history of the latter started to develop year by year, especially with the great efforts of Arabic academia in the domain. So, translators have made important contribution over the centuries in dissemination of ideas and information to a larger audience, in shaping of cultures and in a sense helped unite the world.

 Bibliography

1. Abdessalam Benabdelali, (2006). Fi Attarjama [In translation], (first edition). Casablanca: Dar Toubkal

2. Jeremy Munday. (2001). Introducing Translation Studies, Theories and applications. London and New York: Routledge

3. Kelly, L.G. (1979). The True Interpreter: a History of Translation Theory and Practice in the West. New York, St. Martin's Press.

4. http://www.traduceme.org/profiles/blogs/the-history-of-translation

5. http://blog.onehourtranslation.com/translation/the-history-of-translation/

6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation#cite_note-The_Translator_p._83-6

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