History

The first important translation in the West was that of the Septuagint, a collection of Jewish Scriptures translated into Koine Greek in Alexandria between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE. The dispersed Jews had forgotten their ancestral language and needed Greek versions (translations) of their Scriptures.[27] Throughout the Middle Ages, Latin was the lingua franca of the western learned world. The 9th-century Alfred the Great, king of Wessex in England, was far ahead of his time in commissioning vernacular Anglo-Saxon translations of Bede's Ecclesiastical History and Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. Meanwhile the Christian Church frowned on even partial adaptations of St. Jerome's Vulgate of ca. 384 CE,[28] the standard Latin Bible. In Asia, the spread of Buddhism led to large-scale ongoing translation efforts spanning well over a thousand years. The Tangut Empire was especially efficient in such efforts; exploiting the then newly invented block printing, and with the full support of the government (contemporary sources describe the Emperor and his mother personally contributing to the translation effort, alongside sages of various nationalities), the Tanguts took mere decades to translate volumes that had taken the Chinese centuries to render.[citation needed] Large-scale efforts at translation were undertaken by the Arabs. Having conquered the Greek world, they made Arabic versions of its philosophical and scientific works. During the Middle Ages, some translations of these Arabic versions were made into Latin, chiefly at Crdoba in Spain.[29] Such Latin translations of Greek and original Arab works of scholarship and science helped advance the development of European Scholasticism.

Geoffrey Chaucer The broad historic trends in Western translation practice may be illustrated on the example of translation into the English language. The first fine translations into English were made in the 14th century by Geoffrey Chaucer, who adapted from the Italian of Giovanni Boccaccio in his own Knight's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde; began a translation of the French-language Roman de la Rose; and completed a translation of Boethius from the Latin. Chaucer founded an English poetic tradition on adaptations and translations from those earlier-established literary languages.[29] The first great English translation was the Wycliffe Bible (ca. 1382), which showed the weaknesses of an underdeveloped English prose. Only at the end of the 15th century did the great age of English prose translation begin with Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthuran adaptation of Arthurian romances so free that it can, in fact, hardly be called a true translation. The first great Tudor translations are, accordingly, the Tyndale New Testament (1525), which influenced the Authorized Version (1611), and Lord Berners' version of Jean Froissart's Chronicles (152325).[29]

Marsilio Ficino Meanwhile, in Renaissance Italy, a new period in the history of translation had opened in Florence with the arrival, at the court of Cosimo de' Medici, of the Byzantine scholar Georgius Gemistus Pletho shortly before the fall of Constantinople to the Turks (1453). A Latin translation of Plato's works was undertaken by Marsilio Ficino. This 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, Aristotle and Jesus.[29] Non-scholarly literature, however, continued to rely on adaptation. France's Pliade, England's Tudor poets, and the Elizabethan translators adapted themes by Horace, Ovid, Petrarch and modern Latin writers, forming a new poetic style on those models. The English poets and translators sought to supply a new public, 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.[29]

Edward FitzGerald The Elizabethan period of translation saw considerable progress beyond mere paraphrase toward an ideal of stylistic equivalence, but even to the end of this period, which actually reached to the middle of the 17th century, there was no concern for verbal accuracy.[30] In the second half of the 17th century, the poet John Dryden sought to make Virgil speak "in words such as he would probably have written if he were living and an Englishman". Dryden, however, discerned no need to emulate the Roman poet's subtlety and concision. Similarly, Homer suffered from Alexander Pope's endeavor to reduce the Greek poet's "wild paradise" to order.[30]

Benjamin Jowett Throughout the 18th century, the watchword of translators was ease of reading. Whatever they did not understand in a text, or thought might bore readers, they omitted. They cheerfully assumed that their own style of expression was the best, and that texts should be made to conform to it in translation. For scholarship they cared no more than had their predecessors, and they did not shrink from making translations from translations in third languages, or from languages that they hardly knew, oras in the case of James Macpherson's "translations" of Ossianfrom texts that were actually of the "translator's" own composition.[30] The 19th century brought new standards of accuracy and style. In regard to accuracy, observes J.M. Cohen, the policy became "the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text", except for any bawdy passages and the addition of copious explanatory footnotes. [31] In regard to style, the Victorians' aim, achieved through far-reaching metaphrase (literality) or pseudo-metaphrase, was to constantly remind readers that they were reading a foreign classic. An exception was the outstanding translation in this period, Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859), which achieved its Oriental flavor largely by using Persian names and discreet Biblical echoes and actually drew little of its material from the Persian original.[30] In advance of the 20th century, a new pattern was set in 1871 by Benjamin Jowett, who translated Plato into simple, straightforward language. Jowett's example was not followed, however, until well into the new century, when accuracy rather than style became the principal criterion.[30]

[edit] Modern translation

As languages change, texts in an earlier version of a language either original texts or old translations may be difficult for more modern readers to understand. Texts may thus be translated into more modern language, called a modern translation (sometimes modern English translation or modernized translation). This is particularly done either for literature from classical languages (such as Latin or Greek), most prominently the Bible (see Modern English Bible translations), or for literature from an earlier stage of the same language, such as the works of William Shakespeare (which is largely understandable to a modern audience, but presents some difficulties), or The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer (which is not generally understandable to modern readers). Modern translation is applicable to any language with a long literary history; for example in Japanese, The Tale of Genji (11th century) is generally read in modern translation see Genji: modern readership. Modern translation often involves literary scholarship and textual revisions, as there is frequently not a single canonical text. This is particularly noteworthy in the case of the Bible and Shakespeare, where modern scholarship can result in significant changes to the text. Modern translation meets with opposition from some traditionalists; in English this is most significant in some people preferring the Authorized King James Version of the Bible to modern translations, and to reading Shakespeare in the original (circa 1600) text, rather than in modern translation. An opposite process is found in translating modern literature into classical language, particularly for the goal of extensive reading see List of Latin translations of modern literature for examples.

Evolution of Translation
Submitted by Sarah Schnellbacher on Fri, 04/15/2011 - 11:59pm Evolution and Literature Web Paper 3

There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book --Edith Hamilton In Bryn Mawr College's 2011 Evolutionary Literature course, we have explored the art of language in its dance with the sciences. We began the course reading Darwin's On the Origin of Species which combines the romanticism of the Victorian era with the progressive leaps of science. As we moved to modern works such as Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea and Richard Power's Generosity, we saw an adaptation of the culture for which each author writes from timidity and caution to bold affirmation of biological evolution. The greatest adaptation we saw, however, was in the translated text of Camus's the Plague and the film Adaptation. In each of these works we were seeing "at best an echo" of the original work (George Borrow). The art of translation from one medium to another is an impossible task because there is not a direct one to one correlation of words between languages. For globalization, however, translation between languages is essential and made possible through the departmentalization of translation and machine translation capabilities. This shift in methods of translation is an adaptation within the ethics of translation. The departmentalization of translation has led to translation of texts by anonymous authors. The translators work in teams to complete projects at a faster pace and thus the fidelity of translation does not lie in the hands of one translator. This can serve to provide a closer or more distanced translation from the original text. By working in teams, there is a system of checks and balances among translators for which translators become accountable to one another; however, the division of original text among translators can lead to each translator having a less cohesive interpretation of the text as a whole. The translator is not chastised for mistakes but rather the institution outputting translated work. Thus there is less at stake for the individual translator to remain true to the original work when his work will be nameless. This contrasts deeply with the liability bestowed on the translator of the Renaissance. During the Renaissance we see examples of translators being put to death for minute changes to original text. The translator Etienne Dolet was killed for adding three words that were not originally present in Plato but was only punished with jail sentence for having killed a man in his youth. Likewise the translator William Tyndale who produced the first English translation of the Bible was sentenced to death by King Henry VIII for corrupting the Latin text through translation. The Renaissance translator, therefore, had everything to lose by spinning a translation. The high stakes of translation forced the translator to remain as true to the text as possible. As this fidelity to the original text may have its positive attributes, the speed of translation needed today does not allow for the careful critique of original texts as would have occurred during the Renaissance.

If we are looking for a word to word based translation of a text, then computer databases can perform this task with great speed; however, the emergent property of the text is lost. Idioms of one language do not translate word for word. In an attempt to keep the emergent properties of phrases, computer systems log the idiomatic meaning of phrases. These could be considered the memes of language with regard to translation. This idiomatic log of phrases is useful for the translation of instruction manuals and pieces of information for communication but is incompatible with the translation of literature. Allan Turner discusses in his paper "Translation and Criticism" how the use of idiomatic phrases in translation can create a different connotation than that intended by the author. Turner explains the difficulties in translating Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and the mistakes in various translations of Tolkien's work. Tolkien is a language scholar and thus focuses on the Germanic roots and mythology of the English language in Lord of the Rings. He goes out of his way to avoid the use of any idioms that place the piece in a certain time period to create a sense of timelessness and any idioms that have Greek or Latin origins as his ancient civilizations predate the Roman conquer of Germania. Because terms of antiquity in romance languages stem from the Latin, translations in the Romance languages use Latin phrases and idioms that are purposefully avoided by Tolkien. The translator despite his best efforts to use appropriate terminology in remaining loyal to the author betrays the work unknowingly. Turner conveys that the art of translation is not just knowing what is there but also what is not there to truly remain loyal to a text. The author Virginia Woolf subscribes to this claim that translating the words is not enough to truly remain loyal to the text (Dalgarno). She out of disappointment with the available translations of Agamemnon provides her own private translation of the work explaining meaning between the lines. She feels that because the forms of discourse differ, it is necessary for the translator to bridge the gap in understanding even if this goes beyond what is directly written. Woolf believes that the original Greek is the best but that it should be available for those who can not read Greek. This takes us back to the quote at the beginning of the page by Edith Hamilton. The translation is a work that helps those of us who lack the skills to unlock the beauty and style of a piece in it's mother tongue to approach this Nirvana, but we can never experience the true beauty of a work unless we read the work in the original language. With translation style or meaning is necessarily lost because languages are not one to one. We see that the art of translation is a balancing act. A translator can remain true to the words but will lose style in doing so. If he chooses to deviate from the original text, such as Ezra Pound, then he may maintain style but lose fidelity to the original words. In modern translational ethics it is no longer so important that the translator remain loyal to the text but that he tell his purpose in translation and to what aspect of the text he is attempting loyalty. This allows the reader to take the translation with a grain of salt and eliminates the need to execute translators over manipulation of the original work.