It is significant to review the
history of translation in different languages. There are
divisions of period made by scholars
like George Steiner.
According to Steiner, the history of
translation is divided into four
periods. Starting from the Roman translators Cicero and Horace to
Alexander Fraser Tytler is the first
period;
the second period extends up to
Valery and from
Valery to 1960s becomes the third
period and the fourth period 1960s onwards. The history of
translation is stressed out from
3000 B.C. Rosetta Stone is considered the most ancient work of
translation belonged to the second
century B.C. Livius Andronicus translated Homer’s Odyssey
named Odusia into Latin in 240 B.C.
All that survives is parts of 46 scattered lines from 17
books of the Greek 24-book epic. In
some lines, he translates literally, though in others more
freely. His translation of the
Odyssey had a great historical importance. Before then, the
Mesopotamians and Egyptians had
translated judicial and religious texts, but no one had yet
translated a literary work written
in a foreign language until the Roman Empire. Livius’
translation made this fundamental
Greek text accessible to Romans, and advanced literary
culture in Latin. This project was
one of the best examples of translation as artistic process. The
work was to be enjoyed on its own,
and Livius strove to preserve the artistic quality of original.
Since there was no tradition of epic
in Italy before him, Livius must have faced enormous
problems. For example, he used
archaizing forms to make his language more solemn and intense.
His innovations will be important in
history of Latin poetry. In the fragments we have it is clear
that Livius had a desire to remain
faithful to the original and to be clear, while having to alter
untranslatable phrases and ideas.
For example, the phrase “equal to the gods”, which would have
been unacceptable to Romans was
changed to “summus adprimus”, “greatest and of first rank”.
Also early Roman poetry made use of
pathos, expressive force and dramatic tension, so Livius
interprets Homer with a mind to
these ideas as well. In general, Livius did not make arbitrary
change to the text; rather he
attempted to remain faithful to Homer and to the Latin language.
Then Quintilian, Cicero, Horace,
Catallus and Younger Pliny tried their hand to theorize
translation and practiced it. Cicero
and Horace were from the later generation of translation
history who differentiated between
word for word and sense for sense translation. The most
significant turn in the history of
translation came with the Bible translations. The efforts of
translating the Bible from its
original languages into over 2,000 others have spanned more than
two millennia. Partial translation
of the Bible into languages of English people can be stressed
back to the end of the seventh
century, including translations into Old English and Middle
English. Over 450 versions have been
created overtime. Although John Wycliffe is often
credited with the first translation
of the Bible into English, there were, in fact, many translations
of large parts of the Bible
centuries before Wycliffe’s work. The Bible continues to be the most
translated book in the world. This
fact is revealed by same statistics which is approximate. As of
2005, at least one book of the Bible
translated into 2,400 of the 6,900 languages listed by SIL—
Summer Institute of
Linguistics—including 680 languages in Africa, followed by 590 in Asia,
420 in Oceania, 420 in Latin America
and the Caribbean, 210 in Europe, and 75 in North
America. The United Bible Societies
are presently assisting in over 600 Bible translation
projects. The Bible is available in
whole or in part to some 98 percent of world’s population in a
language in which they are fluent.
The United Bible Society had been announced that as 31st December
2007 the Bible was available in 438 languages, 123 of which included the deuterocanonical
material as well as the Tanakh and New Testament. Either the Tanakh or the
New Testament alone was available in
an additional 1168 languages, and portions of the Bible
were available in another 848
languages, for a total of 2,454 languages. In 1999, Wycliffe Bible
translators announced Vision 2025.
All these numbers reveal the
importance and place of Bible in translation history. It needs
to write something about English
Bible translation history. The fascinating story of how we got
the Bible into English in its present
form actually starts thousands of years ago. But toward the
end of the seventh century, the
Venerable Bede began a translation of scripture into Old
English—Anglo-Saxon. Aldhelm (c.
639-709) translated the complete Book of Psalms and large
portions of other scriptures into
Old English. In the tenth century an Old English translations of
the Gospels was made in the
Lindisfarne Gospels; a word-for- word gloss inserted between the
lines of the Latin text by Aldred,
provost of Chester-le- Street. This is the oldest extant
translation of the Gospels into the
English language. The Wessex Gospels—the West-Saxon
Gospels—are a full translation of
the four gospels into a West Saxon dialect of Old English
produced approximately 990, they are
the first translation of all four gospels into English without
the Latin text. In the 11th
century, Abbot Aelfric translated much of the Old Testament into Old
English. The English Bible was first
translated from the Latin vulgate into Old English by a
select monks and scholars. Such
translations were in the form of prose or as interlinear glosses—
literal translations above the
words. Very few complete translations existed during that time.
Rather, most of the books of the
Bible existed separately and were read as individual texts. Thus,
the sense of Bible as history that
often exists today did not exist at that time. Instead a more
allegorical rendering of the Bible
was more common and translations of the Bible often included
the writer’s own commentary on
passages in addition to the literal translation.
The ormulum is in Middle English of
the 12th century. Like its old English precursor from Aelfric, an
Abbot of Eynsham, it includes very little Biblical text, and focuses more on
personal commentary. This style was adopted by many of the original English
translators. For example the story of the Wedding at Cana is almost 800 lines
long, but fewer than 40 lines are the actual translation of the text. An
unusual characteristic is that the translation mimics Latin verse, and so is
similar to the better known and appreciated 14th century English
poem, Cursor Mundi. Richard Rolle (1290-1349) wrote an English Psalter. Many
religious works are attributed to Rolle, but it has been questioned how many
are genuinely from his hand. Many of his works were concerned with personal
devotion, and some were used by the Lollards.
The 14th century theologian John Wycliffe (1330-1384)
is credited with translating what is now known as Wycliffe’s Bible, though it
is not clear how much of the translation he himself did. This translation came
out in two different versions. The earlier translation text is characterized by
a strong adherence to the word order of Latin, and might have been difficult
for the layperson to comprehend. The later text made more concessions to the
native grammar of English. Early modern translations of the Bible are those
which were made between about 1500 and 1800, the period of Early Modern
English. This was the first major period of Bible translation into English
language. It began with the dramatic introduction of the Tyndale Bible. The
early 16th century Tyndale Bible differs from the others since
Tyndale used the Greek and Hebrew texts of the New and Old Testaments in addition
to Jerome’s Latin translation. Tyndale is also unique in that he was the first
of the
Middle English translators to use
the printing press to help distribute several thousand copies of
this translation throughout England.
It included the first “authorized version” known as the Great
Bible (1539); the Geneva Bible
(1560), notable for being the first Bible divided into verses, and
the Bishop’s Bible (1568), which was
an attempt by Elizabeth 1st to create a new authorized
4 version. It also included the
landmark King James Version (1611) and Douay-Rheims Bibles.
Douay-Rheims’ Bible is the first
complete English Catholic Bible. Called Douay-Rheims
because the New Testament portion
was completed in Rheims France in 1582 followed by the
Old Testament finished in 1609 in
Douay. In this version the 14 books of the Apocrypha are
returned to the Bible in the order
written rather than kept separate in an appendix. Early English
Bibles were generally based on Greek
texts or Latin translations. Modern English translations of
the Bible are based on wider variety
of manuscripts in the original languages—Greek and
Hebrew. The translators put much
scholarly effort into cross-checking the various sources such
as the Septuagint, Textus Receptus
and Masoretic Text. Relatively recent discoveries such as the
Dead Sea scrolls provide additional
reference information. There is some controversy over which
texts should be used as a basis for
translation, as some of the alternate sources do not include
phrases—sometimes entire
versed—which are found only in the Textus Receptus. Some say the
alternate sources were poorly
representative of the texts used in their time, whereas other claim
the Textus Receptus includes
passages that were added to the alternate texts improperly. These
controversial passages are not the
basis for disputed issues of doctrine, but tend to be additional
stories or snippets of phrases. Many
Modern English translations such as the New International
Version contain limited text notes
indicating where differences occur in original sources. A
somewhat greater number of textual
differences are noted in the New King James Bible,
indicating hundreds of New Testament
differences between the Nestle-Aland, the Textus
Receptus and the Hodges edition of
the majority text. The differences in the Old Testament are
less well documented, but do contain
some references to differences between consonantal
interpretations in the Masoretic
Text, the Dead Sea scrolls and the Septuagint. Even with this
hundreds of differences, however, a
more complete listing is beyond the scope of most single
volume Bibles. Modern translations
take different approaches to the rendering of the original
languages of approaches. The
approaches can usually be considered to be somewhere on a scale
between the two extremes: Formal
equivalence translation—sometime literal translation or
Formal correspondence—in which the
greatest effort is made to preserve the meaning of
individual words and phrases in the
original, without regard for its understandability by modern
readers. Dynamic equivalence,
sometimes called paraphrase translation, in which the translator
attempts to render the sense and
intent of the original. Examples of these versions include The
Living Bible and The Message. While
most translations are made by committees of scholars in order to avoid bias or
idiosyncrasy, translations are sometimes made by individuals. The
translation of J.B. Philips, J.N.
Darby’s Darby , R.A. Knox, Gerrit Verkuy’s Berkeley Version
and The Message are largely the work
of individual translators. Robert Alter has also translated
individual books of the Bible
specifically to capture what he sees as their specific flavour. Most
translations make the translators’
best attempt at a single rendering of the original, relying on
footnotes where there might be
alternative translations or textual variants. An alternative is taken
by the Amplified . In case where a
word of phrase admits of more than one meaning the
Amplified presents all the possible
interpretations, allowing the reader to choose one. For
example, the first two verses of the
Amplified read: “In the beginning God (prepared, formed,
fashioned, and) created the heavens
and the earth. The earth was without form and an empty
waste, and darkness was upon the
face of the very great deep. The spirit of God was moving
(hovering, brooding) over the face
of the waters.” (Web biblegateway.com).
16th century marked a
good turn in translation other than the Bible translation only.
George Chapman (1559?-1634)
translated Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in metrical form (iambic
pentameter and iambic heptameter)
which became his most famous works, from 1598 he
published his translation of Iliad
in installments and in 1616 the complete Iliad and Odyssey
appeared in The Whole Works of
Homer, the first English translation, which until Pope’s was the most popular
in the English language and was the way most English speakers encountered these
poems. His translation of Homer was much admired by John Keats. Chapman also
translated the Homeric Hymns, the Georgics of Vergil, the works of Hesiod
(1618, dedicated to Francis Bacon), the Hero and Leander of Musaeus (1618) and
the fifth Satire of Juvenal (1624).
Chapman’s translation of Homer’s
epic the Odyssey, originally published in folio, 1614—16, has
become as rare as to be inaccessible
to the general reader and comparatively unknown to the
more curious student of old English
Literature (translation). Martin Luther (1483-1546) had
published his German translation of
the New Testament in 1522 and, he and his collaborators
completed the translation of the Old
Testament in 1534, when the whole was published. He
continued to refining the
translation until the end of his life. Others had translated the Bible into
German, but Luther tailored his
translation to his own doctrine. Luther’s translation used the
variant of German spoken at the
Saxon Chancellery intelligible to both northern and southern
Germans. Luther Bible made a
significant contribution to the evolution of German language and
literature, and of course to
translation.
Seventh century is the notable age
of translation history, because according to Suka
Joshua:
“The seventeenth century is the
great age of French classicism. Translation of the French
classics increased greatly in France
between 1625 and 1660, and the French writers were in turn
enthusiastically translated into
English. Sir John Denham in his theory stated that the translator
and the original writer are equals
differentiated only by the social and temporal contexts.
Abraham Cowley in his ‘Preface’ to
Pindarique Odes argued for freedom in translation and
established imitation as a branch of
translation. John Dryden devoted most of his last twenty
years to translate the ancient
classics and update the modern. His preface to Ovid’s Epistles
served as the starting point for nearly
every discussion of translation in the eighteenth century.”
(3).
The seventeenth century knew the
birth of many influential theorists such as Sir John
Denham (1615-69), Abraham Cowley
(1618-67), John Dryden (1631-1700)—who was famous
for his distinction between three
types of translation; metaphrase, paraphrase and imitation—and
Alexander Pope (1688-1744). Dryden
translated works by Horace, Juvenal, Ovid, Lucretius and
Theocritus, a task which he found
far more satisfying than writing for the stage. In 1694, he
began work on what would be his most
ambitious and defining work as translator, The Work of
Vergil (1697), which was published
by subscription. His final translations appeared in the
volumes Fables Ancient and Modern
(1700), a series of episodes from Homer, Ovid and
Boccaccio, as well as modernized
adaptations from Geoffrey Chaucer interspersed with
Dryden’s own poems. The Preface to
Fables is considered to be both a major work of criticism
and one of the finest essays in
English. As a critic and translator he was essential in making
accessible to the reading English
public literary works in classical languages. Pope had been
fascinated by Homer since childhood.
In 1713, he announced his plans to publish a translation of
the Iliad. His translation appeared
between 1715 and 1720. It was acclaimed by Samuel Johnson
as a performance which no age or
nation could hope to equal. With the help of William Broome
and Elijah Fenton, he also
translated Odyssey in 1726.
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 Fraser Tytler’s volume of
Principles of Translation (1791) is a case in point. The
other exponents of this period were
Samuel Johnson and George Campbell. Tytler’s treatise is
important in the history of
translation theory. He said that translation should fully represent the
ideas, style of the original and
possess the ease of original composition. During the century
translators strove for ease of
reading. Omitting whatever they did not understand in the text or
whatever they thought would be
boring to the reader. At the end of this century, much interest
shown by the British East India
colonial administrators in the languages, literature and culture of
their subjects, and the discovery
and the translation of ancient Indian works was highly
encouraged.
According to 18th century
scholars, translators should have the contemporary reader
in mind while translation and convey
the author’s spirit and manner in a more natural way.
The nineteenth century was
characterized by two conflicting tendencies; the first
considered translation as a category
of thought and saw the translator as a creative genius, who
enriches the literature and language
into which he is translating, while the second saw him
through the mechanical function of
making a text or an author known. This period knew also the
enhancement of Romanticism, the fact
that laid to the birth of many theories and translations in
the domain of literature, especially
poetic translation. An example of this translation is the one
used by Edward Fitzgerald (1809-63)
for Rubaiyat Omar Al-Khayyam (1858). Percy Bysshe
Shelley (1792-1822), one of our
greatest poets, was a brilliant translator as well. He translated
three of the Plato dialogues: The
Banquet (Symposium) in 1818 and Ion in 1821. But his
translation of Phaedo is lost. The
elevation and sophistication of Shelley’s prose make his
translation much better vehicle for
Plato’s writing than the rather chatty and colloquial
translations current today. Samuel
Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) a major writer, critic and poet
has translated an important
work—Goethe’s Faust—in 1821. For many years Dante Gabrial
Rossetti (1828-82) worked on English
translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri’s
La Vita Nuova, published as the
Early Italian Poets in 1861. Thus 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 Bible. In regard of
19th century translation activity, Joshua’s view is notable:
The field of translation flourished with strange theories during the nineteenth century.
Shelley was cynical towards
translation and Coleridge tried to distinguish between fancy and
imagination. Fredrich Schleiermacher
suggested a separate sublanguage to be used for translation
should show faithfulness to the
forms and language of the original.
The Victorian translation gave
importance to literalness, archaism and formalism. Unlike
Dryden and Pope, Victorians wanted
to convey the remoteness of the original in time and place.
Mathew Arnold for example, gave a
literal translation of Homer into English and was criticized
for neglecting the spirit of the
original work. The Revised and American Standard Versions of
the Bible best illustrate the
harmful effects of a literalistic Victorian translation.” (3-4).
In the twentieth century translation
was viewed as a social action by religious and
political forces with many societies
and organizations 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 the translation. The
political arena of this century saw translations as a political mission, and
highly political content was translated from Chinese, Russian, and other Asian
and European languages to English, as well as from Canadian, French into English
and vice versa. It is worth noting that the translation sexual and religious
content in China began in the 80s, and was well received, despite its discouragement
during the Cultural Revolution. In the same period, studies on translation became
an important course in language teaching and learning at schools. It also saw
the development of translation research products, such as Machine Translation
and Compute
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