Translation, in reference to language, is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text.The Oxford Companion to the English Language, Namit Bhatia, ed., 1992, pp. 1,051–54. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in all languages) between translating written texts and interpreting oral or signed communications between languages.
A translator always risks inadvertently introducing source-language words, grammar, or syntax into the target-language rendering. Such "spill-overs", however, have sometimes imported useful source-language calques and loanwords that have enriched target languages.
Since the 1940s, efforts have been made, with varying degrees of success, to automate translation or to mechanically aid the human translator.W.J. Hutchins, Early Years in Machine Translation: Memoirs and Biographies of Pioneers, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2000. More recently, the rise of the Internet has fostered a world-wide market for translation services and has facilitated "language localisation".M. Snell-Hornby, The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints?, Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 2006, p. 133.
Etymology
The word for the concept of "translation", in English and some other European languages, stems from the Latin noun , formed from the adverb , "across", and , derived from , the past participle of the verb , to "carry" or "bring". Thus, the Latin noun and its cognate modern derivatives mean the "bringing across" (i.e., the transferring) of a text from one language to another.Christopher Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil", p. 83.
In some other European languages, the word for the concept of "translation" stems from another Latin noun, , derived from the verb , "bring across", formed from the adverb , "across", and , to "lead" or "bring".
The Ancient Greek term for "translation" (, "a speaking across") has supplied English with "metaphrase" (word-for-word translation), as contrasted with "paraphrase" (rephrasing in other words, from ). "Metaphrase" corresponds in one of the more recent terminologies to formal equivalence, and "paraphrase" to dynamic equivalence.Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil", p. 84.
The concept of metaphrase (i.e., word-for-word translation) is imperfect, because a given word in a given language often carries more than one meaning, and because a similar given meaning may often be represented in a given language by more than one word. Nevertheless, metaphrase and paraphrase may be useful as ideal concepts that mark the extremes in the spectrum of possible approaches to translation.
See also the entry for translation at Wiktionary.
Theories Western theory Discussions of the theory and practice of translation reach back into antiquity and show remarkable continuities. The ancient Greeks distinguished between metaphrase (literal translation) and paraphrase. This distinction was adopted by English poet and translator John Dryden (1631–1700), who described 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:
Dryden cautioned, however, against the licence 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 as adequate as any that has been proposed since Cicero and Horace, who, in 1st-century-BCE Rome, famously and literally cautioned against translating word for word ().
Despite occasional theoretical diversity, the actual practice of translation 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.
In general, translators have sought to preserve the context itself by reproducing the original order of sememes, and hence word orderLydia Davis, "Eleven Pleasures of Translating", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIII, no. 19 (8 December 2016), pp. 22–24. "I like to reproduce the word order, and the order of ideas, of the original [text] whenever possible. [p. 22] [T]ranslation is, eternally, a compromise. You settle for the best you can do rather than achieving perfection, though there is the occasional perfect solution [to the problem of finding an equivalent expression in the target language]." (p. 23.)—when necessary, reinterpreting the actual grammatical structure, for example, by shifting from active to passive voice, or vice versa. The grammatical differences between "fixed-word-order" languagesTypically, analytic languages. (e.g. English, French, German) and "free-word-order" languagesTypically, synthetic languages. (e.g., Greek, Latin, Polish, Russian) have been no impediment in this regard. The particular syntax (sentence-structure) characteristics of the text of a source language are adjusted to the syntactic requirements of the target language.
When a target language has lacked terms that are found in a source language, translators have borrowed those terms, 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. A greater problem, however, is translating terms relating to cultural concepts that have no equivalent in the target language.Some examples of this are described in the article, "Translating the 17th of May into English and other horror stories", retrieved 15 April 2010. For full comprehension, such situations require the provision of a gloss.
Generally, the greater the contact and exchange that have existed between two languages, or between those languages and a third one, the greater is the ratio of metaphrase to paraphrase that may be used in translating among 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. For example, the English actual should not be confused with the cognate French ("present", "current"), the Polish ("present", "current," "topical", "timely", "feasible"),Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil", p. 85. the Swedish aktuell ("topical", "presently of importance"), the Russian ("urgent", "topical") or the Dutch actueel ("current").
The translator's role as a bridge for "carrying across" values between cultures has been discussed at least since Terence, the 2nd-century-BCE Roman adapter of Greek comedies. The translator's role is, however, by no means a passive, 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 such 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.
The translator of the Bible into German, Martin Luther (1483–1546), is credited with being the first European to posit that one translates satisfactorily only toward his own language. L. G. Kelly states that, since Johann Gottfried Herder in the 18th century, "it has been axiomatic" that one translates only toward his own language.L. G. Kelly, cited in Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil", p. 86.
Compounding the demands on the translator is the fact that no dictionary or thesaurus can ever be a fully adequate guide in translating. The Scottish historian 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, in 1783, been made by the Polish poet and grammarian Onufry Kopczyński.Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil", p. 86.
Other traditions Due to Western colonialism and cultural dominance in recent centuries, Western translation traditions have largely replaced other traditions. The Western traditions draw on both ancient and medieval traditions, and on more recent European innovations.
Though earlier approaches to translation are less commonly used today, they retain importance when dealing with their products, as when historians view ancient or medieval records to piece together events which took place in non-Western or pre-Western environments. Also, though heavily influenced by Western traditions and practiced by translators taught in Western-style educational systems, Chinese and related translation traditions retain some theories and philosophies unique to the Chinese tradition.
Near East
Traditions of translating material among the languages of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Assyria (Syriac language), Anatolia, and Israel (Hebrew language) go back several millennia. There exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh () into Southwest Asian languages of the second millennium BCE.J. M. Cohen, "Translation", Encyclopedia Americana, 1986, vol. 27, p. 12.
An early example of a bilingual document is the 1274 BCE Treaty of Kadesh between the ancient Egyptian and Hittie empires.
The Babylonians were the first to establish translation as a profession.Bakir, K. H. 1984. Arabization of Higher Education in Iraq. PhD thesis, University of Bath.
The first translations of Greek and Coptic texts into Arabic, possibly indirectly from Syriac translations,Wakim, K. G. 1944. Arabic Medicine in Literature. Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 32 (1), January: 96-104. seem to have been undertaken as early as the late seventh century CE.Hitti, P. K. 1970. History of the Arabs from the Earliest Times to the Present. 10th ed. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
The second Abbasid Caliph funded a translation bureau in Baghdad in the eighth century.Monastra, Y., and W. J. Kopycki. 2009. Libraries. In: The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World. edited by J. L. Esposito, 2nd ed., vol.3, 424-427. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bayt al-Hikma, the famous library in Baghdad, was generously endowed and the collection included books in many languages; it became a leading centre for the translation of works from antiquity into Arabic, with its own Translation Department.Hussain, S. V. 1960. Organization and Administration of Muslim Libraries: From 786 A.D. to 1492 A.D. Quarterly Journal of the Pakistan Library Association 1 (1), July: 8-11.
Translations into European languages from Arabic versions of lost Greek and Roman texts began in the middle of the eleventh century, when the benefits to be gained from the Arabs’ knowledge of the classical texts were recognised by European scholars, particularly after the establishment of the Toledo School of Translators in Spain.
William Caxton’s Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres (Sayings of the Philosophers, 1477) was a translation into English of an eleventh-century Egyptian text which reached English via translation into Latin and then French.
The translation of foreign works for publishing in Arabic was revived by the establishment of the Madrasat al-Alsun (School of Tongues) in Egypt in 1813.S. A. El Gabri, The Arab Experiment in Translation, New Delhi, India, Bookman’s Club, 1984.
Asia