The history of translation

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION           2

 

Chapter I. The historical development of translation                                         6

 

1.1. The historical approaches to translation    ______     ____12                       

 

Chapter II . The translation theory in Russian culture           14

 

 

 

Chapter III.  Development of the theory of translation in the twentieth century                                                                                      22                                                                                                  

 

 

Conclusion                   24     

 

Bibliography_________________________________________________________26

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

     Translation is a very ancient kind of human activity. As soon as groups of people with different languages were born in human history, bilinguals appeared and they helped to communicate between collectives of different languages.

     In the Western world, the origins of translation are often linked with the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. It is said that until this point every person in the world spoke the same language. The human race decided to try and build a tower that would be so tall that it would reach heaven. According to the story, God did not approve of this so he spread the human race across the world. He made people speak many different languages so that they were unable to continue communicating with each other. It was from this point that the need for translationwasborn. 
In historical and archaeological terms, translation has been dated back as far as Ancient Greek and Roman times. 
     It is believed by some that translation is a Roman invention, as they translated many Greek philosophical and scientific works. Cicero and Horace are known as the first theorists to distinguish between word-for-word translation and sense-for-sense translation. However, throughout history, the translators themselves were rarely acknowledged or given any kind of recognition. As a result, there are very few well-known translators from early periods of history. One recognised translator was a Chinese monk called Xuanzang. He is thought to have translated 74 volumes of Buddhist scriptures originating from India into Chinese in 645 AD.

     With the development of the written language, written translators join oral ones. They translated different texts of official, religious and business character. Translation had the main social function at first. It made possible inter-linguistic communication of people. The spreading of the written translation opened to people the wide access to cultural achievements of other nations; it made possible interaction and inter-enrichment of literature and culture. The knowledge of foreign languages let to read original books, but not everybody can earn at least one foreign language.

     Translation services became particularly prominent in the 16th Century. This was due to controversy over translation of the Bible during the Reformation. During this period, translation came to be used as a weapon in political conflicts. William Tyndale was arrested and executed in Holland in 1536 for translating the Bible into English. At the time, English was seen as the common vernacular language.

     In the 18th Century the translator began to be seen as an artist. The translator had a duty towards both the author of the text and the receiver, and was expected to convey more than just the literal meaning of the text. In the 19th Century the British translator Constance Garnett was praised for brilliantly translating a vast collection of Russian classics by the likes of Turgenev, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoyevski.

Despite the huge progress in the field of translation services across time, it is still an area in which there remains great debate. Translation theories and techniques are studied in Universities across the world. Translation is seen as both a science and an art.

     Thanks to modern advances in technology, there is now much better communication across the world. As a result, translators have access to more practical research methods. These include the sharing of digital materials and cultural references. We have also seen the birth of new types of translation such as subtitling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The historical development of translation

   In ancient times, communities engaged in international trade, exchanging in this way ideas and observations. When returning travelers, who knew several languages, though not necessarily read them all, were unable to read the classical written word in their language of origin, the translation of classical scriptures became necessary. Also, when communities spoke different languages, in Babylon for example, official proclamations were translated into those languages in order to communicate with the subjects. Translation showed two orientations in ancient times, 'sense for sense' and 'word for word'.

     About his approach to translation, Cicero has been quoted as having said: "If I render word for word, the result will sound uncouth (strange), and if compelled by necessity I alter anything in the order or wording, I shall seem to have departed from the function of a translator. (Citation from Basnett-McGuire 1980: 43)

     One of the first recorded examples of translation was that of the Septuagint - a collection of Jewish Scriptures - in Alexandria, between the 3rd and 1st centuries B.C. The Rosetta Stone, with its trilingual version (hieroglyphic-Egyptian, demotic-Egyptian, ancient-Greek) of the same decree, dates back to the 2^nd century and is a non-religious icon of the art of translation.

     Other relevant translations in antiquity were those of the works of Plato and Protagoras, and other classics, translated into Latin by Cicero, as well as the translation of the New Testament by  Saint Jerome, from Hebrew into non-literary Latin.

     In 9th century Baghdad, Arabic was a new target language for an immense job of translating scientific and medical content from Greek and Syriac. The House of Wisdom was a major intellectual center and key institution in the Translation Movement, during the Islamic Golden Age.

     During the Middle Ages we find translations from Greek into Arabic, such as the works of Hippocrates, Plato and Aristotle, between the 8th and 9th century A.D.; from Arabic and Syriac into Latin (the lingua franca - or working language - in the 11th and 12th century), after the invasion of Spain by the Moors; from Sanskrit into Telugu between the 11th and 13th century A.D.; and Arabic versions of Greek scientific and philosophical classics into Latin - helping thus to advance the development of European Scholasticism.

     West Saxons also saw the translation of books into languages everyone could understand. During this time we can also find translations from Italian, French, and Latin into English. It was during the 14th century that the Bible was translated into English by John Wycliffe. During the 15th century John Purvey prepared a comprehensible, natural version of the New Testament so that everybody could understand it.

     The Renaissance saw the Latin translation of Plato's works by Marsilio Ficino in Italy, as well as that of the New Testament into Latin and Greek by Erasmus. A superabundance of translations, mainly from Greek was also observed.

     In England and elsewhere, scientific and religious texts were translated into vernaculars (native languages), promising then access to the Latin culture. In India, Sanskrit was translated into Bengali, enabling in this way the understanding and control of the subjects by their rulers. With the rise of Protestantism, Martin Luther translated the Bible into High German. In England, William Tyndalle translated the Old Testament from Hebrew and the New Testament from Greek into English. George Chapman translated Homer's Iliad, Odyssey, and Batrachomyomachia into English. In India, many Sanskrit classics were translated into other Indian languages like Assamese, Bengali, Malayalam, Marathi and Oriya. Étienne Dolet, French translator and humanist, formulated the first fundamental principles of translation in 1540.

     The 17th century saw an abundance of Greek, Latin and French classics translations into English, progressing "beyond mere paraphrase toward an ideal of stylistic equivalence". During this period three types of translation were identified, metaphrase, paraphrase and imitation.  

     During the 18th century translators strove for "ease of reading", omitting in this way whatever they did not understand in the text or whatever they thought would be boring to the reader, though the idea, the style and manner of writing and the case of the original work were nonetheless emphasized by Alexander Fraser Tytler in 1791. At the end of this century, much interest was shown by the British East India Colonial administrators in the languages, literature and culture of their subjects, and the discovery and translation of ancient Indian works was highly encouraged. The 19th century saw an abundance of translations from a variety of languages into English, like the translation of Goethe's work from German into English, and the translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (a collection of poems) from Persian into English. The Bible was also translated into hundreds of languages all over the world, and many English books and texts were translated into various Indian languages. It is worth noting that word lists and grammatical descriptions of the languages of inhabitants of European colonies were prepared, which eventually facilitated the translation of the Bible.

     In the late 19th century Dr. Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof invented Esperanto (meaning 'one who hopes'), an international auxiliary language for peace and progress. Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy-to-learn and politically neutral language that would foster peace and international understanding between people with different regional and/or national languages. According to Zamenhof, he created this language to foster harmony between people from different countries. Despite the 10,000 to 2,000,000 speakers of this language, Esperanto has not been officially adopted by any country.

     In the 20th century translation was viewed as a social action by religious and political forces, with many societies and organizations being created and fostering Bible translations into many different languages, including those of primitive and tribal societies. By the second half of the 20th century accuracy and style was the main criterion in translation.

   The political arena of the  20th century saw translations as a political mission, and highly political content was translated from Chinese, Russian, and other Asian and European languages into English, as well as from Canadian French into English and vice versa. It is worth noting that the translation of sexual and religious content in China began in the 80s, and was well received, despite its discouragement during the Cultural Revolution.

     The 20th century also saw the development of translation research products, such as Machine Translation and Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tools, which continue to be used and improved to this day. CAT tools include specialized programs and aids, such as grammar and dictionary software, translation memory, terminology management, text search tools index/concordance,  quality check, alignment programs statistical tools, etc.

  

 

The historical approaches to translation

     To generalize historical approaches to translation of literary classics one cannot but notice three distinct schools in almost every European country: those of classicism, romanticism and realism. Modernist attitudes to translations can be traced too.

     Classical translation was rational and it centered round an idea of giving the public a good book to read. Any sort of alteration and correction was justified by the desire to please and instruct the reader. “Pleasant and useful translations” were meant for aristocracy and reflected its understanding of the beautiful, the ugly, the tragic, the comical etc. No recognition of copyright existed at that time, the translator was free to change or omit whatever he disliked or regarded inappropriate for the subtle perception of the generally acknowledged aesthetic norm.

     Romantic translation was ambitious in striving to reveal the spirit of far lands and old history, it thus both cared for and challenged individual and national images and flavours. That is why the problem of translatability (esp. the lack of stylistic resources) became unprecedentedly acute. The trend viewed translation as a field of fatal duel between the author and the translator. Contests among translators aimed at giving utmost expression to a romantic idea rather than to change it. Yet, nationalization of expression was by far frequent.

     Realistic translation took the stage only after national literatures acknowledged themselves as nationally specific, self-sufficient and potent enough to give up direct imitations. At this stage a literature would normally find its own greatest classics that changed the language to such a degree that it could adequately convey specific ideas and images that had formerly belonged to other nations. This gave birth to a new phenomenon widely known today as the world literature.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Translation theory in Russian culture

     Translation work in Russia has a long and fruitful historical traditions. It was carried out on a considerable scale as early as in Kiev Rus, where first religious and then secular books were translated mainly from the classical languages (9^th-10^th centuries). The number of readers at the time was rather limited, no high standards of quality were set to the translators and their translations were often obscure and sometimes unintelligible. The translators had a poor command of their own language and they blindly followed the source text without giving much thought to the intelligibility of the resulting text.

     The 18^th century proved decisive in the development of translation in Russia. Peter the Greats political reforms, which greatly expanded Russia economic and cultural contacts with the European countries, created a growing demand for translations of scientific and technical material as well as of works of fiction. Translators were now expected to meet higher quality standards than previous centuries. Czar Peter issued a special decree on translation demanding a «distinct» rendering of the original sense. This was the period when the Russian language began to develop its literary norm and many enlightened Russians found in translating a way of enriching that language and asserting its originality as well as its expressive potential. The Great Russian scientist M. Lomonosov often emphasized the great translation potential of the Russian language. He claimed that the work of Cicero, Virgil or Ovid lost none of their excellence in their Russian translation. Lomonosov, as well as his prominent contemporaries Sumarokov and Tredyakovsky, made many translations, predominantly of poetry. All three often supplemented their translations with theoretical discussion, arguing that the source text had to be rendered as it was, and emphasizing the great value of the translators work as well as its creative character. That was all part of the heated debate that accompanied the activity of translation throughout its history.

     As in the other countries, two opposite direction emerged in the practice of translation in Russia from the very beginning. When enabling business or diplomatic contacts between different nations and, later, translating books of fiction, translators could choose relatively freely among the various expressive means of the target language. Their translation could imitate the source text to a greater or smaller extent: sometimes it was such a very free rendering as to be a kind of re-telling. On the contrary, when translating religious texts, especially the Bible, or philosophical treatises or other publications considered as classical, translator strove for maximum linearity even to the detriment of the sense and norms of the target language, as all formal features in the source text were sacred to them. In fact they believed these texts had some profound, if not always intelligible, sense, and they did their utmost to reproduce not only the spirit but also the letter of the “divine revelation”.

      These two extremes in the practice of translation continued in Russia in more recent times. But now the choice between literal and free translation was motivated by translators^’ intentions and the way they understood their task, rather than by the nature of the source text. The advocates of literal translation paid homage to a loyalty to the source text claiming that the art of translation should make it transparent, ie. that  the source text should be seen through the target text word for word. Such transparency was, they insisted, the hall mark of any translation worthy of the name, and any deviation from the source text would have resulted in a paraphrase or original work.

     On the other side, the advocates of ‘free’ translation accused their adversaries of “slavishly copying” the foreign text. They pointed out that a literal translation can never been correct, as it distorts the target language imposing upon it alien forms and expressions, and makes the target text obscure and inaccessible to its readers.

     The confrontation between the two main trends in translation was not always so clear cut, however. Some translators believed such extremes to be complementary and tried to make use of both in every translation they made. However this confrontation emerges very clearly in the process of a Russian translation school in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The school began to take shape thanks to the translation work of such outstanding Russian authors as Karamzin and Zhukovsky. At the end of the 18^th century Karamzin published many translations in several periodicals. His aim was twofold: he considered translation to be both a good school for the improvement of the writer’s style and a source of information. As he put it: “for the sake of curiosity, for historical facts, for women, for new magazines, or from books not very well known”. The spectrum of Karamzin’s activity as a translator was very wide: he translated ancient and contemporary authors from Greek, Latin, French, German, English, Italian and some Oriental languages.

     Pushkin referred to V.A. Zhukovsky as “the genius of translation”. Zhukovsky was a talented original poet, but translations make up a considerable part of his poetry. He translated from English, French, Old Russian, Latin and German. The range of his creative search is staggering: from his translation of fairy-tales by Perrault and the Grimm brothers to a complete translations of Homer’s Odyssey and of the famous Old Russian epic “The Tale of Igor’s Host”. Like Karamzin, he advocated free translation which sometimes bordered on paraphrase or telling a new story on the same subject. His brilliant talent, however, forcefully reproduced the style, rhythm and intonation of the source text and his best translations were remarkably true. The Russian school of translation owes much to Zhukovsky’s wonderful example.

     A place of honour in the history of translation in Russia belongs to our great poets A. Pushkin and M. Lermontov. Although translations occupied a relatively modest place in the poetic activity, they made notable contribution to the history of literary translation in Russia. Their poetical paraphrases and imitations served as a model of perfection to all other translators. They established as a fundamental principle the ideal that a good literary translation is part and parcel of the national literature of the target language community. Pushkin’s role in the formation of the Russian school of translation was especially important. He always showed great interest in the problems of translation and his critical analyses of translations were exemplary and thought-provoking. His insistence on loyalty to the source text coupled with the high quality and expressiveness of the translator’s language and style had a beneficial effect on the best Russian translators in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

     The history of translation in Russia took on a new dimension after the October Revolution of 1917. It was the beginning of a tremendous upsurge in translation activity which gave rise to a new Soviet school of translation. For the first time in Russian history people could access the treasure-house of national and world culture. The task was to bring to them everything that was valuable and progressive in the culture, literature and art of the other nations. Obviously, translators had no small role to play in this cultural revival.

     Soon after the consolidation of the new order a new publishing house, “The World Literature”, was set up on Maxim Gorky’s initiative. Its publishers pursued the ambitious goal of producing new or revised translations of all major literary achievements both in the West and in the East. In the face of enormous material and organizational difficulties, they managed to publish in the following two decades or so the works of such famous authors as Balzac, Anatole France, Stendhal, Heine, Schiller, Byron, Dickens, B. Shaw, Mark Twain and many others.

In the 1930s and later, a great number of translations were also published by many national and local publishers. The country’s scholars and authors made their contributions to the enlargement of translation production. The art of translation was elevated to a new level of perfection. Conscious of their mission and responsibility in the cultural development of their nation, translators strove to preserve in their translations the spiritual values embodied in the work of the world’s best authors. They formulated and applied new principles of adequacy in translation which avoided both extreme literalness and unwarranted liberties with the source text. A whole galaxy of brilliant translators emerged in the country who won world-wide recognition for the Russian translation school. The names of such past-masters of the art as M. Losinsky, T. Shchepkina-Kupernik, S. Marshak, N. Lubimov, E. Kalashnikova, N. Daruzes and many others were well known and much respected.

    

 

 

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Development of the theory of translation in the twentieth century

     Modern Western Schools of translation theory and translation After World War II, science and technology, linguistics and translation undertakings flourish, machine translation is quietly rising. People's views on translation also will be changed. Translation is not only an art or skill, but also a science, and literature and art, sociology, psychology, information theory and the theory NC, and other related disciplines but their own systems science. Translation theory studies, is no longer confined to philosophers, writers and translators, language and translation to become an expert in the study of systems of the serious issue. Therefore, the translation of Western theory further development. Modern Western translation theory in the development of two major characteristics: 1) theoretical research into linguistics areas, the modern linguistics and the impact of information theory, and thus the obvious color of linguistics, and the traditional theory of literary translation in stark contrast; 2) In the past theorists behind closed doors, not contact with the situation be broken. On the theorists through, magazines, essays, etc., fully express their views. In addition, as means of transportation, publishing industry and the progress of the emergence of international academic organizations, countries translation theorists keep close contacts between the academic exchanges have been strengthened. Modern Western translation theory there are four main schools: Prague faction, London faction, the United States sent structure and Communication Theory camp. The founder of the School for Mahi Hughes (Vilem Mathesius), the Kuwaiti and Iraqi Telubeishi (Nikolay S. Trubetskoy) and Accor may Dobson (Roman Jakobson).   The school's main arguments: 1. must be taken into account language translation of a variety of functions, including cognitive function, the expression of features and tools, such as functional 2. must attach importance to language translation of comparison, including the semantics, grammar, voice, language, style as well as literary genre comparisons.