Transfer of the meaning of something in one language into another
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KingCharles V the Wise commissions a translation ofAristotle. First square shows his ordering the translation; second square, the translation being made. Third and fourth squares show the finished translation being brought to, and then presented to, the King.
Translation in the field oflanguage is thecommunication of themeaning of asource-language text by means of anequivalenttarget-language text (also called 'receptor language').[1] The English language draws aterminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) betweentranslating (a written text) andinterpreting (oral orsigned communication between users of different languages); under this distinction, translation can begin only after the appearance ofwriting within a language community.
A translator always risks inadvertently introducing source-language words,grammar, orsyntax into the target-language rendering. On the other hand, such "spill-overs" have sometimes imported useful source-languagecalques andloanwords that have enriched target languages.
The word for theconcept of "translation", in English and some other European languages, stems from the Latinnountranslatio,[5] formed from theadverbtrans, "across", and-latio, derived fromlatus, thepast participle of theverbferre, to "carry" or "bring". Thus, the Latin nountranslatio and itscognate modern derivatives mean the "bringing across" (i.e., thetransferring) of a text from one language to another.[6]
In some other European languages, the word for theconcept of "translation" stems from another Latinnoun,trāductiō, derived from theverbtrādūcō, "bring across", formed from theadverbtrans, "across", anddūcō, to "lead" or "bring".[6]
TheAncient Greek term for "translation" (metaphrasis, "a speaking across") has supplied English with "metaphrase" (word-for-word translation), as contrasted with "paraphrase" (rephrasing in other words, fromparaphrasis).[6] "Metaphrase" corresponds in one of the more recent terminologies toformal equivalence, and "paraphrase" todynamic equivalence.[7]
The concept of metaphrase (i.e., word-for-word translation) is an imperfect concept, 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.
Discussions of the theory and practice of translation reach back intoantiquity and show remarkable continuities. Theancient Greeks distinguished betweenmetaphrase (literal translation) andparaphrase. This distinction was adopted by English poet and translatorJohn Dryden (1631–1700), who described translation as the judicious blending of these two modes of phrasing when selecting, in the target language, "counterparts," orequivalents, 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.[6]
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..."[7]
This general formulation of the central concept of translation—equivalence—is as adequate as any that has been proposed sinceCicero andHorace, who, in 1st-century-BCERome, famously and literally cautioned against translating word for word (verbum pro verbo).[7]
Despite occasional theoretical diversity, the actualpractice of translation has hardly changed since antiquity. Except for some extreme metaphrasers in the early Christian period and theMiddle Ages and adapters in various periods (especially pre-Classical Rome, and the 18th century), translators have generally shown prudent flexibility in seekingequivalents—"literal" where possible, paraphrastic where necessary—for the originalmeaning and other crucial "values" (e.g.,style,verse form, concordance with musical accompaniment or, in films, with speecharticulatory movements) as determined from context.[7]
In general translators have sought to preserve thecontext itself by reproducing the original order ofsememes, and henceword order[8]—when necessary, reinterpreting the actualgrammatical structure, for example, by shifting fromactive topassive voice, orvice versa. The grammatical differences between "fixed-word-order"languages[9] (e.g. English,French,German) and "free-word-order" languages[10] (e.g.,Greek,Latin,Polish,Russian) have been no impediment in this regard.[7] 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 lackedterms 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 fewconcepts that are "untranslatable" among the modern European languages.[7] A greater problem, however, is translating terms relating to cultural concepts that have no equivalent in the target language.[11] For full comprehension, such situations require the provision of agloss.
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 ofmetaphrase toparaphrase that may be used in translating among them. However, due to shifts inecological niches of words, a commonetymology is sometimes misleading as a guide to current meaning in one or the other language. For example, the Englishactual should not be confused with thecognate Frenchactuel ("present", "current"), the Polishaktualny ("present", "current," "topical", "timely", "feasible"),[12] the Swedishaktuell ("topical", "presently of importance"), the Russianактуальный ("urgent", "topical") or the Dutchactueel ("current").
The translator's role as a bridge for "carrying across" values between cultures has been discussed at least sinceTerence, 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 anartist. The main ground seems to be the concept of parallel creation found in critics such asCicero. Dryden observed that "Translation is a type of drawing after life..." Comparison of the translator with a musician or actor goes back at least toSamuel Johnson's remark aboutAlexander Pope playingHomer on aflageolet, while Homer himself used abassoon.[12]
The translator of theBible 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 sinceJohann Gottfried Herder in the 18th century "it has been axiomatic" that one translates only toward his own language.[13]
Compounding the demands on the translator is the fact that nodictionary orthesaurus can ever be a fully adequate guide in translating. The Scottish historianAlexander Tytler, in hisEssay 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 thespoken language, had earlier, in 1783, been made by the Polish poet andgrammarianOnufry Kopczyński.[14]
Due toWestern 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.
TheBabylonians were the first to establish translation as a profession.[16]
The first translations of Greek and Coptic texts into Arabic, possibly indirectly from Syriac translations,[17] seem to have been undertaken as early as the late seventh century CE.[18]
The second Abbasid Caliph funded a translation bureau in Baghdad in the eighth century.[19]
Bayt al-Hikma, the famous library in Baghdad, was generously endowed and the collection included books in many languages, and it became a leading centre for the translation of works from antiquity into Arabic, with its own Translation Department.[20]
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 Escuela de Traductores de Toledo in Spain.
William Caxton’sDictes 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 theMadrasat al-Alsun (School of Tongues) in Egypt in 1813.[21]
There is a separate tradition of translation inSouth,Southeast andEast Asia (primarily of texts from theIndian andChinese civilizations), connected especially with the rendering of religious, particularlyBuddhist, texts and with the governance of the Chinese empire. Classical Indian translation is characterized by loose adaptation, rather than the closer translation more commonly found in Europe; andChinese translation theory identifies various criteria and limitations in translation.
In the East Asian sphere of Chinese cultural influence, more important than translationper se has been the use and reading of Chinese texts, which also had substantial influence on the Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages, with substantialborrowings of Chinese vocabulary and writing system. Notable is the Japanesekanbun, a system forglossing Chinese texts for Japanese speakers.
Though Indianized states in Southeast Asia often translatedSanskrit material into the local languages, the literate elites and scribes more commonly used Sanskrit as their primary language of culture and government.
Some of the art of classicalChinese poetry [writes Link] must simply be set aside asuntranslatable. The internal structure ofChinese characters has a beauty of its own, and thecalligraphy in which classical poems were written is another important but untranslatable dimension. Since Chinese characters do not vary in length, and because there are exactly five characters per line in a poem like [the one thatEliot Weinberger discusses in19 Ways of Looking atWang Wei (with More Ways)], another untranslatable feature is that the written result, hung on a wall, presents a rectangle. Translators into languages whose word lengths vary can reproduce such an effect only at the risk of fatal awkwardness....Another imponderable is how to imitate the 1-2, 1-2-3rhythm in which five-syllable lines in classical Chinese poems normally are read. Chinese characters are pronounced in one syllable apiece, so producing such rhythms in Chinese is not hard and the results are unobtrusive; but any imitation in a Western language is almost inevitably stilted and distracting. Even less translatable are the patterns oftone arrangement in classical Chinese poetry. Each syllable (character) belongs to one of two categories determined by thepitch contour in which it is read; in a classical Chinese poem the patterns of alternation of the two categories exhibitparallelism and mirroring.[23]
Most of the difficulties, according to Link, arise in addressing the second problem, "where the impossibility of perfect answers spawns endless debate." Almost always at the center is the letter-versus-spiritdilemma. At the literalist extreme, efforts are made to dissect every conceivable detail about the language of the original Chinese poem. "The dissection, though," writes Link, "normally does to the art of a poem approximately what thescalpel of ananatomy instructor does to the life of a frog."[23]
Chinese characters, in avoidinggrammatical specificity, offer advantages to poets (and, simultaneously, challenges to poetry translators) that are associated primarily with absences ofsubject,number, andtense.[24]
It is the norm in classicalChinese poetry, and common even in modern Chinese prose, to omit subjects; the reader or listener infers a subject. The grammars of some Western languages, however, require that a subject be stated (although this is often avoided by using a passive or impersonal construction). Most of the translators cited in Eliot Weinberger's19 Ways of Looking atWang Wei supply a subject. Weinberger points out, however, that when an "I" as a subject is inserted, a "controlling individual mind of the poet" enters and destroys the effect of the Chinese line. Without a subject, he writes, "the experience becomes both universal and immediate to the reader." Another approach to the subjectlessness is to use the target language'spassive voice; but this again particularizes the experience too much.[24]
Nouns have nonumber in Chinese. "If," writes Link, "you want to talk in Chinese about one rose, you may, but then you use a "measure word" to say "one blossom-of roseness."[24]
Chineseverbs aretense-less: there are several ways to specify when something happened or will happen, butverb tense is not one of them. For poets, this creates the great advantage ofambiguity. According to Link, Weinberger's insight about subjectlessness—that it produces an effect "both universal and immediate"—applies to timelessness as well.[24]
Link proposes a kind of uncertainty principle that may be applicable not only to translation from the Chinese language, but to all translation:
Dilemmas about translation do not have definitive right answers (although there can be unambiguously wrong ones if misreadings of the original are involved). Any translation (except machine translation, a different case) must pass through the mind of a translator, and that mind inevitably contains its own store of perceptions, memories, and values.Weinberger [...] pushes this insight further when he writes that "every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader's intellectual and emotional life." Then he goes still further: because a reader's mental life shifts over time, there is a sense in which "the same poem cannot be read twice."[24]
Translation of material intoArabic expanded after the creation ofArabic script in the 5th century, and gained great importance with the rise ofIslam and Islamic empires. Arab translation initially focused primarily on politics, rendering Persian, Greek, even Chinese and Indic diplomatic materials into Arabic. It later focused on translating classical Greek and Persian works, as well as some Chinese and Indian texts, into Arabic for scholarly study at major Islamic learning centers, such as theAl-Karaouine (Fes,Morocco),Al-Azhar (Cairo,Egypt), and theAl-Nizamiyya of Baghdad. In terms of theory, Arabic translation drew heavily on earlier Near Eastern traditions as well as more contemporary Greek and Persian traditions.
Arabic translation efforts and techniques are important to Western translation traditions due to centuries of close contacts and exchanges. Especially after theRenaissance, Europeans began more intensive study of Arabic and Persian translations of classical works as well as scientific and philosophical works of Arab and oriental origins. Arabic, and to a lesser degree Persian, became important sources of material and perhaps of techniques for revitalized Western traditions, which in time would overtake the Islamic and oriental traditions.
had conceded defeat in their centuries-old battle to contain the corrupting effects of theprinting press, [an] explosion in publishing ... ensued. Along with expanding secular education, printing transformed an overwhelmingly illiterate society into a partly literate one.
In the past, thesheikhs and the government had exercised a monopoly over knowledge. Now an expanding elite benefitted from a stream of information on virtually anything that interested them. Between 1880 and 1908... more than six hundred newspapers and periodicals were founded in Egypt alone.
The most prominent among them wasal-Muqtataf ... [It] was the popular expression of atranslation movement that had begun earlier in the century with military and medical manuals and highlights from theEnlightenment canon. (Montesquieu'sConsiderations on the Romans andFénelon'sTelemachus had been favorites.)[25]
A translator who contributed mightily to the advance of the Islamic Enlightenment was the Egyptian cleric Rifaa al-Tahtawi (1801–73), who had spent five years inParis in the late 1820s, teaching religion toMuslim students. After returning to Cairo with the encouragement ofMuhammad Ali (1769–1849), theOttoman viceroy of Egypt, al–Tahtawi became head of the new school of languages and embarked on an intellectual revolution by initiating a program to translate some two thousand European and Turkish volumes, ranging from ancient texts on geography and geometry toVoltaire's biography ofPeter the Great, along with theMarseillaise and the entireCode Napoléon. This was the biggest, most meaningful importation of foreign thought into Arabic sinceAbbasid times (750–1258).[26]
In France al-Tahtawi had been struck by the way the French language... was constantly renewing itself to fit modern ways of living. YetArabic has its own sources of reinvention. The root system that Arabic shares with otherSemitic tongues such as Hebrew is capable of expanding the meanings of words using structuredconsonantal variations: the word for airplane, for example, has the same root as the word for bird.[27]
The movement to translate English and European texts transformed the Arabic andOttomanTurkish languages, and new words, simplified syntax, and directness came to be valued over the previous convolutions. Educated Arabs and Turks in the new professions and the modernizedcivil service expressedskepticism, writesChristopher de Bellaigue, "with a freedom that is rarely witnessed today ... No longer was legitimate knowledge defined by texts in the religious schools, interpreted for the most part with stultifying literalness. It had come to include virtually any intellectual production anywhere in the world." One of theneologisms that, in a way, came to characterize the infusion of new ideas via translation was"darwiniya", or "Darwinism".[25]
One of the most influential liberal Islamic thinkers of the time wasMuhammad Abduh (1849–1905), Egypt's senior judicial authority—its chiefmufti—at the turn of the 20th century and an admirer ofDarwin who in 1903 visited Darwin's exponentHerbert Spencer at his home inBrighton. Spencer's view ofsociety as an organism with its own laws of evolution paralleled Abduh's ideas.[28]
AfterWorld War I, when Britain and France divided up the Middle East's countries, apart from Turkey, between them, pursuant to theSykes-Picot agreement—in violation of solemn wartime promises of postwar Arab autonomy—there came an immediate reaction: theMuslim Brotherhood emerged in Egypt, theHouse of Saud took over theHijaz, and regimes led by army officers came to power inIran and Turkey. "[B]oth illiberal currents of the modern Middle East," writesde Bellaigue, "Islamism and militarism, received a major impetus from Westernempire-builders." As often happens in countries undergoing social crisis, the aspirations of the Muslim world's translators and modernizers, such as Muhammad Abduh, largely had to yield to retrograde currents.[29]
Fidelity (or "faithfulness") and felicity[30] (ortransparency), also known singularly asequivalence, are often (though not always) at odds. A 17th-century French critic coined the phrase "les belles infidèles" to suggest that translations can be either faithful or beautiful, but not both.[a] Fidelity is the extent to which a translation accurately renders themeaning of thesource text, without distortion. Transparency is the extent to which a translation appears to a native speaker of the target language to have originally been written in that language, and conforms to its grammar, syntax and idiom. John Dryden (1631–1700) wrote in his preface to the translation anthologySylvae:
Where I have taken away some of [the original authors'] Expressions, and cut them shorter, it may possibly be on this consideration, that what was beautiful in the Greek or Latin, would not appear so shining in the English; and where I have enlarg'd them, I desire the false Criticks would not always think that those thoughts are wholly mine, but that either they are secretly in the Poet, or may be fairly deduc'd from him; or at least, if both those considerations should fail, that my own is of a piece with his, and that if he were living, and an Englishman, they are such as he wou'd probably have written.[32]
A translation that meets the criterion of fidelity (faithfulness) is said to be "faithful"; a translation that meets the criterion of transparency, "idiomatic". Depending on the given translation, the two qualities may not be mutually exclusive. The criteria for judging the fidelity of a translation vary according to the subject, type and use of the text, its literary qualities, its social or historical context, etc. The criteria for judging the transparency of a translation appear more straightforward: an unidiomatic translation "sounds wrong" and, in extreme cases of word-for-word translation, often results in patent nonsense.
Nevertheless, in certain contexts a translator may consciously seek to produce a literal translation. Translators of literary, religious, or historic texts often adhere as closely as possible to the source text, stretching the limits of the target language to produce an unidiomatic text. Also, a translator may adopt expressions from the source language in order to provide "local color".
While current Western translation practice is dominated by the dual concepts of "fidelity" and "transparency", this has not always been the case. There have been periods, especially in pre-Classical Rome and in the 18th century, when many translators stepped beyond the bounds of translation proper into the realm ofadaptation.Adapted translation retains currency in some non-Western traditions. TheIndian epic, theRamayana, appears in many versions in the variousIndian languages, and the stories are different in each. Similar examples are to be found inmedieval Christian literature, which adjusted the text to local customs and mores.
Many non-transparent-translation theories draw on concepts fromGerman Romanticism, the most obvious influence being the German theologian and philosopherFriedrich Schleiermacher. In his seminal lecture "On the Different Methods of Translation" (1813) he distinguished between translation methods that move "the writer toward [the reader]", i.e., transparency, and those that move the "reader toward [the author]", i.e., an extreme fidelity to the foreignness of the source text. Schleiermacher favored the latter approach; he was motivated, however, not so much by a desire to embrace the foreign, as by a nationalist desire to oppose France's cultural domination and to promoteGerman literature[citation needed].
In recent decades, prominent advocates of such "non-transparent" translation have included the French scholarAntoine Berman, who identified twelve deforming tendencies inherent in most prose translations,[33] and the American theoristLawrence Venuti, who has called on translators to apply "foreignizing" rather than domesticating translation strategies.[34]
The question offidelity vs.transparency has also been formulated in terms of, respectively, "formal equivalence" and "dynamic [orfunctional] equivalence" – expressions associated with the translatorEugene Nida and originally coined to describe ways of translating theBible; but the two approaches are applicable to any translation. "Formal equivalence" corresponds to "metaphrase", and "dynamic equivalence" to "paraphrase". "Formal equivalence" (sought via "literal" translation) attempts to render the text literally, or "word for word" (the latter expression being itself a word-for-word rendering of theclassical Latinverbum pro verbo) – if necessary, at the expense of features natural to the target language. By contrast, "dynamic equivalence" (or "functional equivalence") conveys the essential thoughts expressed in a source text—if necessary, at the expense of literality, originalsememe andword order, the source text's active vs. passivevoice, etc.
There is, however, no sharp boundary between formal and functional equivalence. On the contrary, they represent a spectrum of translation approaches. Each is used at various times and in various contexts by the same translator, and at various points within the same text – sometimes simultaneously. Competent translation entails the judicious blending of formal and functionalequivalents.[35]
Common pitfalls in translation, especially when practiced by inexperienced translators, involve false equivalents such as "false friends"[36] andfalse cognates.
In the practice of translation, thesource language is the language being translated from, while thetarget language – also called thereceptor language[37][38] – is the language being translated into.[39] Difficulties in translating can arise fromlexical andsyntactical differences between the source language and the target language, which differences tend to be greater between two languages belonging to differentlanguage families.[40]
Often the source language is the translator'ssecond language, while the target language is the translator'sfirst language.[41] In some geographical settings, however, the source language is the translator's first language because not enough people speak the source language as a second language.[42] For instance, a 2005 survey found that 89% of professional Slovene translators translate into their second language, usually English.[42] In cases where the source language is the translator's first language, the translation process has been referred to by various terms, including "translating into a non-mother tongue", "translating into a second language", "inverse translation", "reverse translation", "service translation", and "translation from A to B".[42] The process typically begins with a full and in-depth analysis of the original text in the source language, ensuring full comprehension and understanding before the actual act of translating is approached.[43]
Translation for specialized or professional fields requires a working knowledge, as well, of the pertinent terminology in the field. For example, translation of a legal text requires not only fluency in the respective languages but also familiarity with the terminology specific to the legal field in each language.[44]
While the form and style of the source language often cannot be reproduced in the target language, the meaning and content can. LinguistRoman Jakobson went so far as to assert that all cognitive experience can be classified and expressed in any living language.[45] LinguistGhil'ad Zuckermann suggests that the limits are not of translationper se but rather ofelegant translation.[46]: 219
In translation, asource text (ST) is a text written in a given source language which is to be, or has been, translated into another language, while atarget text (TT) is a translated text written in the intended target language, which is the result of a translation from a given source text. According toJeremy Munday's definition of translation, "the process of translation between two different written languages involves the changing of an original written text (the source text or ST) in the original verbal language (the source language or SL) into a written text (the target text or TT) in a different verbal language (the target language or TL)".[47] The terms 'source text' and 'target text' are preferred over 'original' and 'translation' because they do not have the same positive vs. negative value judgment.
Translation scholars includingEugene Nida andPeter Newmark have represented the different approaches to translation as falling broadly into source-text-oriented or target-text-oriented categories.[48]
A "back-translation" is a translation of a translated text back into the language of the original text, made without reference to the original text. Comparison of a back-translation with the original text is sometimes used as a check on the accuracy of the original translation, much as the accuracy of a mathematical operation is sometimes checked by reversing the operation.[49]
But the results of such reverse-translation operations, while useful as approximate checks, are not always precisely reliable.[50] Back-translation must in general be less accurate than back-calculation becauselinguistic symbols (words) are oftenambiguous, whereas mathematical symbols are intentionally unequivocal.
Mark Twain provided humorously telling evidence for the frequent unreliability of back-translation when he issued his own back-translation of a French translation of hisshort story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County". He published his back-translation in a 1903 volume together with his English-language original, the French translation, and a "Private History of the 'Jumping Frog' Story". The latter volume included a synopsized adaptation of his story that Twain stated had appeared, unattributed to Twain, in a ProfessorSidgwick'sGreek Prose Composition (p. 116) under the title, "The Athenian and the Frog"; the adaptation had for a time been taken for an independentancient Greek precursor to Twain's "Jumping Frog" story.[52]
When a document survives only in translation, the original having been lost, researchers sometimes undertake back-translation in an effort to reconstruct the original text. An example involves the novelThe Saragossa Manuscript by the Polish aristocratJan Potocki (1761–1815), who wrote the novel in French and anonymously published fragments in 1804 and 1813–14. Portions of the original French-language manuscript were subsequently lost; however, the missing fragments survived in a Polish translation, made byEdmund Chojecki in 1847 from a complete French copy that has since been lost. French-language versions of the completeSaragossa Manuscript have since been produced, based on extant French-language fragments and on French-language versions that have been back-translated from Chojecki's Polish version.[53]
Many works by the influentialClassical physicianGalen survive only in medievalArabic translation. Some survive only inRenaissance Latin translations from the Arabic, thus at a second remove from the original. To better understand Galen, scholars have attempted back-translation of such works in order to reconstruct the originalGreek.[54]
When historians suspect that a document is actually a translation from another language, back-translation into that hypothetical original language can provide supporting evidence by showing that such characteristics asidioms,puns, peculiargrammatical structures, etc., are in fact derived from the original language. For example, the known text of theTill Eulenspiegel folk tales is inHigh German but contains puns that work only when back-translated toLow German. This seems clear evidence that these tales (or at least large portions of them) were originally written in Low German and translated into High German by an over-metaphrastic translator.
Supporters ofAramaic primacy—the view that theChristianNew Testament or its sources were originally written in theAramaic language—seek to prove their case by showing that difficult passages in the existingGreek text of the New Testament make much more sense when back-translated to Aramaic: that, for example, some incomprehensible references are in fact Aramaic puns that do not work in Greek. Due to similar indications, it is believed that the 2nd-century GnosticGospel of Judas, which survives only inCoptic, was originally written in Greek.
John Dryden (1631–1700), the dominant English-language literary figure of his age, illustrates, in his use of back-translation, translators' influence on the evolution of languages and literary styles. Dryden is believed to be the first person to posit that English sentences should not end inprepositions because Latin sentences cannot end in prepositions.[55][56] Dryden created the proscription against "preposition stranding" in 1672 when he objected toBen Jonson's 1611 phrase, "the bodies that those souls were frighted from", though he did not provide the rationale for his preference.[57] Dryden often translated his writing into Latin, to check whether his writing was concise and elegant, Latin being considered an elegant and long-lived language with which to compare; then he back-translated his writing back to English according to Latin-grammar usage. As Latin does not have sentences ending in prepositions, Dryden may have applied Latin grammar to English, thus forming the controversial rule ofno sentence-ending prepositions, subsequently adopted by other writers.[58][b]
Michael Wood, aPrinceton University emeritus professor, writes: "[T]ranslation, like language itself, involves contexts, conventions, class, irony, posture and many other regions wherespeech acts hang out. This is why it helps to compare translations [of a given work]."[60]
[I]t is [hard] to produce a good literary translation. This is certainly true of translations ofancient Greek andRoman texts, but it is also true of literary translation in general: it is very difficult. Most readers of foreign languages are not translators; most writers are not translators. Translators have to read and write at the same time, as if always playing multiple instruments in aone-person band. And most one-person bands do not sound very good.[61]
When in 1921, three years before his death, the English-language novelistJoseph Conrad – who had long had little contact with everyday spoken Polish – attempted to translate into EnglishBruno Winawer's short Polish-language play,The Book of Job, he predictably missed many crucial nuances of contemporary Polish language.[62]
The translator's role, in relation to the original text, has been compared to the roles of other interpretive artists, e.g., a musician or actor who interprets a work of musical or dramatic art. Translating, especially a text of any complexity (like other human activities[63]), involvesinterpretation: choices must be made, which implies interpretation.[12][c][d] Mark Polizzotti writes: "A good translation offers not a reproduction of the work but an interpretation, a re-representation, just as the performance of aplay or asonata is a representation of thescript or thescore, one among many possible representations."[65] A translation of a text of any complexity is – as, itself, a work of art – unique and unrepeatable.
Joseph Conrad, whose writingsZdzisław Najder has described as verging on "auto-translation" from Conrad's Polish and French linguistic personae,[66] advised his niece andPolish translatorAniela Zagórska:
[D]on't trouble to be too scrupulous ... I may tell you (in French) that in my opinionil vaut mieux interpréter que traduire [it is better to interpret than to translate] ...Il s'agit donc de trouver les équivalents. Et là, ma chère, je vous prie laissez vous guider plutôt par votre tempérament que par une conscience sévère ... [It is, then, a question of finding the equivalent expressions. And there, my dear, I beg you to let yourself be guided more by your temperament than by a strict conscience....]"[67]
Conrad advised another translator that the prime requisite for a good translation is that it be "idiomatic". "For in theidiom is theclearness of a language and the language's force and its picturesqueness—by which last I mean the picture-producing power of arranged words."[68] Conrad thoughtC.K. Scott Moncrieff's English translation ofMarcel Proust'sÀ la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time—or, in Scott Moncrieff's rendering,Remembrance of Things Past) to be preferable to the French original.[69][e]
Emily Wilson writes that "translation always involves interpretation, and [requires] every translator... to think as deeply as humanly possible about each verbal, poetic, and interpretativechoice."[70]
a lot of people, when they think about translation, think you sit down with a dictionary and look at the text and get going, but you really have to have an interpretation.... You need to make a decision. I don’t think there’s any translation that is not also an interpretation. There’s no such thing as an absolutely transparent translation.[71]
Translation of other than the simplest brief texts requires painstakinglyclose reading of thesource text and the draft translation, so as to resolve the ambiguities inherent inlanguage and thereby toasymptotically approach the most accurate rendering of the source text.[72]
Part of the ambiguity, for a translator, involves the structure of human language.Psychologist andneural scientistGary Marcus notes that "virtually every sentence [that people generate] isambiguous, often in multiple ways. Our brain is so good at comprehending language that we do not usually notice."[73] An example of linguistic ambiguity is the "pronoun disambiguation problem" ("PDP"): a machine has no way of determining to whom or what apronoun in a sentence—such as "he", "she" or "it"—refers.[74] Such disambiguation is not infallible by a human, either.
Ambiguity is a concern both to translators and – as the writings of poet and literary criticWilliam Empson have demonstrated – toliterary critics. Ambiguity may be desirable, indeed essential, inpoetry anddiplomacy; it can be more problematic in ordinaryprose.[75]
Individualexpressions –words,phrases,sentences – are fraught withconnotations. As Empson demonstrates, any piece of language seems susceptible to "alternative reactions", or as Joseph Conrad once wrote, "No English word has clean edges." All expressions, Conrad thought, carried so many connotations as to be little more than "instruments for exciting blurred emotions."[76]
Translators may render only parts of the original text, provided that they inform readers of that action. But a translator should not assume the role ofcensor and surreptitiously delete orbowdlerize passages merely to please a political or moral interest.[77]
Translating has served as a school of writing for many an author, much as the copying of masterworks ofpainting has schooled many a novice painter.[78] A translator who can competently render an author's thoughts into the translator's own language, should certainly be able to adequately render, in his own language, any thoughts of his own. Translating (likeanalytic philosophy) compels precise analysis oflanguage elements and of their usage. In 1946 the poetEzra Pound, then atSt. Elizabeth's Hospital, inWashington, D.C., advised a visitor, the 18-year-old beginning poetW.S. Merwin: "The work of translation is the best teacher you'll ever have."[79][f] Merwin, translator-poet who took Pound's advice to heart, writes of translation as an "impossible, unfinishable" art.[81]
A translator acts as a bridge between two languages and cultures. When he has completed the first draft of a translation, he stands at the bridge's midpoint. Only after he has fully converted the vocabulary, idioms, grammar, and syntax of the source text to those of the target language, does he arrive at the bridge's other end.
Translators, including monks who spreadBuddhist texts inEast Asia, and the early modern European translators of the Bible, in the course of their work have shaped the very languages into which they have translated. They have acted as bridges for conveying knowledge betweencultures; and along with ideas, they have imported from the source languages, into their own languages, loanwords and calques ofgrammatical structures,idioms, andvocabulary.
Interpreting is the facilitation oforal orsign-languagecommunication, either simultaneously or consecutively, between two, or among three or more, speakers who are not speaking, or signing, the same language. The term "interpreting," rather than "interpretation," is preferentially used for this activity by Anglophone interpreters and translators, to avoid confusion with other meanings of the word "interpretation."
Unlike English, many languages do not employ two separate words to denote the activities ofwritten and live-communication (oral orsign-language) translators.[g] Even English does not always make the distinction, frequently using "translating" as a synonym for "interpreting."
Interpreters have sometimes played crucial roles inhuman history. A prime example isLa Malinche, also known asMalintzin,Malinalli andDoña Marina, an early-16th-centuryNahua woman from the MexicanGulf Coast. As a child she had been sold or given toMaya slave-traders from Xicalango, and thus had become bilingual. Subsequently, given along with other women to the invading Spaniards, she became instrumental in theSpanish conquest ofMexico, acting as interpreter, adviser, intermediary and lover toHernán Cortés.[83]
The famous Chinese man of lettersLin Shu (1852 – 1924), who knew no foreign languages, rendered Western literary classics into Chinese with the help of his friend Wang Shouchang (王壽昌), who had studied in France. Wang interpreted the texts for Lin, who rendered them into Chinese. Lin's first such translation, 巴黎茶花女遺事 (Past Stories of the Camellia-woman of Paris –Alexandre Dumas, fils's,La Dame aux Camélias), published in 1899, was an immediate success and was followed by many more translations from the French and the English.[85]
Sworn translation, also called "certified translation," aims at legal equivalence between two documents written in different languages. It is performed by someone authorized to do so by local regulations, which vary widely from country to country. Some countries recognize self-declared competence. Others require the translator to be an official state appointee. In some countries, such as the United Kingdom, certain government institutions require that translators be accredited by certain translation institutes or associations in order to be able to carry out certified translations.
Web-based human translation is generally favored by companies and individuals that wish to secure more accurate translations. In view of the frequent inaccuracy of machine translations, human translation remains the most reliable, most accurate form of translation available.[86] With the recent emergence of translationcrowdsourcing,[87]translation memory techniques, andinternet applications,[citation needed] translation agencies have been able to provide on-demand human-translation services tobusinesses, individuals, and enterprises.
While not instantaneous like its machine counterparts such asGoogle Translate andBabel Fish (now defunct), as of 2010 web-based human translation has been gaining popularity by providing relatively fast, accurate translation of business communications, legal documents, medical records, andsoftware localization.[88] Web-based human translation also appeals to private website users and bloggers.[89] Contents of websites are translatable but URLs of websites are not translatable into other languages. Language tools on the internet provide help in understanding text.
Computer-assisted translation (CAT), also called "computer-aided translation," "machine-aided human translation" (MAHT) and "interactive translation," is a form of translation wherein a human translator creates atarget text with the assistance of a computer program. The machine supports a human translator.
Computer-assisted translation can include standarddictionary and grammar software. The term, however, normally refers to a range of specialized programs available to the translator, including translation memory,terminology-management,concordance, and alignment programs.
These tools speed up and facilitate human translation, but they do not provide translation. The latter is a function of tools known broadly as machine translation. The tools speed up the translation process by assisting the human translator by memorizing or committing translations to a database (translation memory database) so that if the same sentence occurs in the same project or a future project, the content can be reused. This translation reuse leads to cost savings, better consistency and shorter project timelines.
Machine translation (MT) is a process whereby a computer program analyzes asource text and, in principle, produces a target text without human intervention. In reality, however, machine translation typically does involve human intervention, in the form of pre-editing andpost-editing.[90] With properterminology work, with preparation of thesource text for machine translation (pre-editing), and with reworking of the machine translation by a human translator (post-editing), commercial machine-translation tools can produce useful results, especially if the machine-translation system is integrated with a translation memory ortranslation management system.[91]
Unedited machine translation is publicly available through tools on theInternet such asGoogle Translate,Almaany,[92]Babylon,DeepL Translator, andStarDict. These produce rough translations that, under favorable circumstances, approximate the meaning of the source text. With the Internet, translation software can help non-native-speaking individuals understand web pages published in other languages. Whole-page-translation tools are of limited utility, however, since they offer only a limited potential understanding of the original author's intent and context; translated pages tend to be more erroneously humorous and confusing than enlightening.
Interactive translations withpop-up windows are becoming more popular. These tools show one or more possible equivalents for each word or phrase. Human operators merely need to select the likeliest equivalent as the mouse glides over the foreign-language text. Possible equivalents can be grouped by pronunciation. Also, companies such asEctaco produce pocket devices that provide machine translations.
Relying exclusively on unedited machine translation, however, ignores the fact that communication inhuman language iscontext-embedded and that it takes a person to comprehend the context of the original text with a reasonable degree of probability. It is certainly true that even purely human-generated translations are prone to error; therefore, to ensure that a machine-generated translation will be useful to a human being and that publishable-quality translation is achieved, such translations must be reviewed and edited by a human.[h]Claude Piron writes that machine translation, at its best, automates the easier part of a translator's job; the harder and more time-consuming part usually involves doing extensive research to resolveambiguities in thesource text, which thegrammatical andlexical exigencies of the target language require to be resolved.[94] Such research is a necessary prelude to the pre-editing necessary in order to provide input for machine-translation software, such that the output will not bemeaningless.[90]
The weaknesses of pure machine translation, unaided by human expertise, are those of artificial intelligence itself.[95] As of 2018, professional translator Mark Polizzotti held that machine translation, byGoogle Translate and the like, was unlikely to threaten human translators anytime soon, because machines would never grasp nuance andconnotation.[96] Writes Paul Taylor: "Perhaps there is a limit to what a computer can do without knowing that it is manipulating imperfect representations of an external reality."[97]
Gary Marcus notes that a so far insuperable stumbling block to artificial intelligence is an incapacity for reliabledisambiguation. "[V]irtually every sentence [that people generate] isambiguous, often in multiple ways." A prominent example is known as the "pronoun disambiguation problem": a machine has no way of determining to whom or what apronoun in a sentence—such as "he", "she" or "it"—refers.[98]
In the 2010s a substantial gender imbalance was noted in literary translation into English,[99] with far more male writers being translated than women writers. In 2014 Meytal Radzinski launched theWomen in Translation campaign to address this.[100][101][102]
The first important translation in the West was that of theSeptuagint, a collection ofJewish Scriptures translated into earlyKoine Greek inAlexandria between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE. The dispersed Jews had forgotten their ancestral language and needed Greek versions (translations) of their Scriptures.[103]
InAsia, the spread ofBuddhism led to large-scale ongoing translation efforts spanning well over a thousand years. TheTangut Empire was especially efficient in such efforts; exploiting the then newly inventedblock 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 theChinese centuries to render.[citation needed]
TheArabs undertooklarge-scale efforts at translation. Having conquered theGreek world, they made Arabic versions of its philosophical and scientific works. During the Middle Ages, translations of some of these Arabic versionswere made into Latin, chiefly atCórdoba inSpain.[105] KingAlfonso X the Wise ofCastile in the 13th century promoted this effort by founding aSchola Traductorum (School of Translation) inToledo. There Arabic texts, Hebrew texts, and Latin texts were translated into the other tongues by Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars, who also argued the merits of their respective religions. Latin translations of Greek and original Arab works of scholarship and science helped advance EuropeanScholasticism, and thus European science and culture.
The broad historic trends in Western translation practice may be illustrated on the example of translation into the English language.
Non-scholarly literature, however, continued to rely onadaptation.France'sPléiade, England's Tudor poets, and theElizabethan translators adapted themes byHorace,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 amiddle class and the development ofprinting, with works such as the original authorswould have written, had they been writing in England in that day.[105]
The Elizabethan period of translation saw considerable progress beyond mere paraphrase toward an ideal ofstylistic equivalence, but even to the end of this period, which actually reached to the middle of the 17th century, there was no concern forverbalaccuracy.[106]
In the second half of the 17th century, the poet John Dryden sought to makeVirgil speak "in words such as he would probably have written if he were living and an Englishman". As great as Dryden's poem is, however, one is reading Dryden, and not experiencing the Roman poet's concision. Similarly,Homer arguably suffers fromAlexander Pope's endeavor to reduce the Greek poet's "wild paradise" to order. Both works live on as worthyEnglish epics, more than as a point of access to the Latin or Greek.[106]
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, or—as in the case ofJames Macpherson's "translations" ofOssian—from texts that were actually of the "translator's" own composition.[106]
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 anybawdy passages and the addition of copious explanatoryfootnotes.[i] In regard to style, theVictorians' aim, achieved through far-reaching metaphrase (literality) orpseudo-metaphrase, was to constantly remind readers that they were reading aforeign classic. An exception was the outstanding translation in this period,Edward FitzGerald'sRubaiyat ofOmar 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.[106]
In advance of the 20th century, a new pattern was set in 1871 byBenjamin 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.[106]
As a language evolves, texts in an earlier version of the language—original texts, or old translations—may become difficult for modern readers to understand. Such a text may therefore be translated into more modern language, producing a "modern translation" (e.g., a "modern English translation" or "modernized translation").
Such modern rendering is applied either to literature from classical languages such as Latin or Greek, notably to the Bible (see "Modern English Bible translations"), or to literature from an earlier stage of the same language, as with the works ofWilliam Shakespeare (which are largely understandable by a modern audience, though with some difficulty) or withGeoffrey Chaucer'sMiddle-EnglishCanterbury Tales (which is understandable to most modern readers only through heavy dependence on footnotes). In 2015 theOregon Shakespeare Festival commissioned professional translation of the entire Shakespeare canon, including disputed works such asEdward III,[107] into contemporary vernacular English; in 2019, off-off-Broadway, the canon was premiered in a month-long series of staged readings.[108]
Anna North writes: "Translating the long-dead languageHomer used — a variant ofancient Greek called Homeric Greek — into contemporary English is no easy task, and translators bring their own skills, opinions, and stylistic sensibilities to the text. The result is that every translation is different, almost a new poem in itself." An example isEmily Wilson's 2017 translation of Homer'sOdyssey, where by conscious choice Wilson "lays bare the morals of its time and place, and invites us to consider how different they are from our own, and how similar."[109]
Views on the possibility of satisfactorily translating poetry show a broad spectrum, depending partly on the degree of latitude desired by the translator in regard to a poem's formal features (rhythm, rhyme, verse form, etc.), but also relating to how much of the suggestiveness and imagery in the host poem can be recaptured or approximated in the target language. In his 1997 bookLe Ton beau de Marot,Douglas Hofstadter argued that a good translation of a poem must convey as much as possible not only of its literal meaning but also of its form and structure (meter, rhyme or alliteration scheme, etc.).[110]
Hofstadter, inLe Ton beau de Marot, criticized Nabokov's attitude toward verse translation. In 1999 Hofstadter published his own translation ofEugene Onegin, in verse form.
However, a number of more contemporary literary translators of poetry lean towardAlexander von Humboldt's notion of language as a "third universe" existing "midway between the phenomenal reality of the 'empirical world' and the internalized structures of consciousness."[111] Perhaps this is what poetSholeh Wolpé, translator of the 12th-century Iranian epic poemThe Conference of the Birds, means when she writes:
Twelfth-century Persian and contemporary English are as different as sky and sea. The best I can do as a poet is to reflect one into the other. The sea can reflect the sky with its moving stars, shifting clouds, gestations of the moon, and migrating birds—but ultimately the sea is not the sky. By nature, it is liquid. It ripples. There are waves. If you are a fish living in the sea, you can only understand the sky if its reflection becomes part of the water. Therefore, this translation ofThe Conference of the Birds, while faithful to the original text, aims at its re-creation into a still living and breathing work of literature.[112]
PoetSherod Santos writes: "The task is not to reproduce the content, but with the flint and the steel of one's own language to spark what Robert Lowell has called 'the fire and finish of the original.'"[113]According toWalter Benjamin:
While a poet's words endure in his own language, even the greatest translation is destined to become part of the growth of its own language and eventually to perish with its renewal. Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own.[114]
Gregory Hays, in the course of discussingRoman adapted translations ofancient Greek literature, makes approving reference to some views on the translating of poetry expressed byDavid Bellos, an accomplished French-to-English translator. Hays writes:
Among theidées reçues [received ideas] skewered by David Bellos is the old saw that "poetry is what gets lost in translation." The saying is often attributed toRobert Frost, but as Bellos notes, the attribution is as dubious as the idea itself. A translation is an assemblage of words, and as such it can contain as much or as little poetry as any other such assemblage. TheJapanese even have a word (chōyaku, roughly "hypertranslation") to designate a version that deliberately improves on the original.[115]
The translator's task, when translatingrhymed verse, is more constraining than is the task of the verse's author: the author has full freedom to coordinate his thought with his words; the translator is constrained to adjusting his words to the author's thought.
Book-title translations can be either descriptive or symbolic. Descriptive book titles, for exampleAntoine de Saint-Exupéry'sLe Petit Prince (The Little Prince), are meant to be informative, and can name the protagonist, and indicate the theme of the book. An example of a symbolic book title isStieg Larsson'sThe Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, whose original Swedish title isMän som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women). Such symbolic book titles usually indicate the theme, issues, or atmosphere of the work.
When translators are working with long book titles, the translated titles are often shorter and indicate the theme of the book.[116]
The translation of plays poses many problems such as the added element of actors, speech duration, translation literalness, and the relationship between the arts of drama and acting. Successful play translators are able to create language that allows the actor and the playwright to work together effectively.[117]: 55 Play translators must also take into account several other aspects: the final performance, varying theatrical and acting traditions, characters' speaking styles, modern theatrical discourse, and even the acoustics of the auditorium, i.e., whether certain words will have the same effect on the new audience as they had on the original audience.[118]
Audiences in Shakespeare's time were more accustomed than modern playgoers to actors having longer stage time.[117]: 56 Modern translators tend to simplify the sentence structures of earlier dramas, which included compound sentences with intricate hierarchies of subordinate clauses.[119][120]
In translating Chinese literature, translators struggle to find true fidelity in translating into the target language. InThe Poem Behind the Poem, Barnstone argues that poetry "can't be made to sing through a mathematics that doesn't factor in the creativity of the translator".[121]
A notable piece of work translated into English is theWen Xuan, an anthology representative of major works of Chinese literature. Translating this work requires a high knowledge of thegenres presented in the book, such as poetic forms, various prose types including memorials, letters, proclamations, praise poems, edicts, and historical, philosophical and political disquisitions, threnodies and laments for the dead, and examination essays. Thus the literary translator must be familiar with the writings, lives, and thought of a large number of its 130 authors, making theWen Xuan one of the most difficult literary works to translate.[122]
An important role in history has been played by translation of religious texts. Such translations may be influenced by tension between the text and the religious values the translators wish to convey.[123] For example,Buddhistmonks who translated theIndiansutras intoChinese occasionally adjusted their translations to better reflectChina's distinctculture, emphasizing notions such asfilial piety.
One of the first recorded instances of translation in the West was the 3rd century BCE rendering of some books of the biblicalOld Testament from Hebrew intoKoine Greek. The translation is known as the "Septuagint", a name that refers to the supposedly seventy translators (seventy-two, in some versions) who were commissioned to translate the Bible atAlexandria, Egypt. According to legend, each translator worked in solitary confinement in his own cell, and all seventy versions proved identical. TheSeptuagint became thesource text for later translations into many languages, including Latin,Coptic,Armenian, andGeorgian.
Still considered one of the greatest translators in history, for having rendered the Bible into Latin, isJerome (347–420 CE), thepatron saint of translators. For centuries theRoman Catholic Church used his translation (known as theVulgate), though even this translation stirred controversy. By contrast with Jerome's contemporary,Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE), who endorsed precise translation, Jerome believed in adaptation, and sometimes invention, in order to more effectively bring across the meaning. Jerome's colorful Vulgate translation of the Bible includes some crucial instances of "overdetermination". For example,Isaiah's prophecy announcing that the Savior will be born of a virgin, uses the word 'almah, which is also used to describe the dancing girls atSolomon's court, and simply means young and nubile. Jerome, writesMarina Warner, translates it asvirgo, "adding divine authority to the virulent cult ofsexual disgust that shaped Christian moral theology (the [Moslem]Quran, free from this linguistic trap, does not connectMariam/Mary's miraculous nature with moral horror of sex)." The apple thatEve offered toAdam, according to Mark Polizzotti, could equally well have been anapricot, orange, or banana; but Jerome liked thepunmalus/malum (apple/evil).[30]
The periods preceding and contemporary with theProtestant Reformation saw translations of the Bible intovernacular (local) European languages—a development that contributed toWestern Christianity's split into Roman Catholicism andProtestantism over disparities between Catholic and Protestant renderings of crucial words and passages (and due to a Protestant-perceived need to reform the Roman Catholic Church). Lasting effects on the religions, cultures, and languages of their respective countries were exerted by such Bible translations asMartin Luther's into German (theNew Testament, 1522),Jakub Wujek's into Polish (1599, as revised by theJesuits), andWilliam Tyndale's version (New Testament, 1526 and revisions) and theKing James Version into English (1611).
A famousmistranslation of aBiblical text is the rendering of the Hebrew wordקֶרֶן (keren), which has several meanings, as "horn" in a context where it more plausibly means "beam of light": as a result, for centuries artists, including sculptorMichelangelo, have renderedMoses the Lawgiver with horns growing from his forehead.
Such fallibility of the translation process has contributed to theIslamic world's ambivalence about translating theQuran (also spelledKoran) from the original Arabic, as received by the prophetMuhammad fromAllah (God) through the angelGabriel incrementally between 609 and 632 CE, the year of Muhammad's death. During prayers, theQuran, as the miraculous and inimitable word of Allah, is recited only in Arabic. However, as of 1936, it had been translated into at least 102 languages.[128]
A fundamental difficulty in translating theQuran accurately stems from the fact that an Arabic word, like a Hebrew or Aramaic word, may have arange of meanings, depending oncontext. This is said to be a linguistic feature, particularly of allSemitic languages, that adds to the usual similar difficulties encountered in translating between any two languages.[128] There is always an element of human judgment—of interpretation—involved in understanding and translating a text. Muslims regard any translation of theQuran as but one possible interpretation of theQuranic (Classical) Arabic text, and not as a full equivalent of that divinely communicated original. Hence such a translation is often called an "interpretation" rather than a translation.[129]
To complicate matters further, as with other languages, the meanings and usages of some expressions have changedover time, between the Classical Arabic of theQuran, and modern Arabic. Thus a modern Arabic speaker may misinterpret the meaning of a word or passage in theQuran. Moreover, the interpretation of a Quranic passage will also depend on the historic context of Muhammad's life and of his early community. Properly researching that context requires a detailed knowledge ofhadith andsirah, which are themselves vast and complex texts. Hence, analogously to the translating ofChinese literature, an attempt at an accurate translation of theQuran requires a knowledge not only of the Arabic language and of the target language, including their respective evolutions, but also a deep understanding of the twocultures involved.
Experimental literature, such asKathy Acker’s novelDon Quixote (1986) andGiannina Braschi’s novelYo-Yo Boing! (1998), features a translative writing that highlights discomforts of the interlingual and translingual encounters and literary translation as a creative practice.[130][131] These authors weave their own translations into their texts.
Acker'sPostmodern fiction both fragments and preserves the materiality ofCatullus’s Latin text in ways that tease out its semantics and syntax without wholly appropriating them, a method that unsettles the notion of any fixed and finished translation.[130]
Whereas Braschi's trilogy of experimental works (Empire of Dreams, 1988;Yo-Yo Boing!, 1998, andUnited States of Banana, 2011) deals with the very subject of translation.[132] Her trilogy presents the evolution of the Spanish language through loose translations of dramatic, poetic, and philosophical writings from the Medieval,Golden Age, andModernist eras into contemporary Caribbean, Latin American, and Nuyorican Spanish expressions. Braschi's translations of classical texts in Iberian Spanish (into other regional and historical linguistic and poetic frameworks) challenge the concept of national languages.[133]
Science fiction being agenre with a recognizable set of conventions and literary genealogies, in which language often includesneologisms, neosemes,[clarification needed] andinvented languages, techno-scientific andpseudoscientific vocabulary,[134] and fictional representation of the translation process,[135][136] the translation of science-fiction texts involves specific concerns.[137] The science-fiction translator tends to acquire specific competences and assume a distinctive publishing and cultural agency.[138][139] As in the case of other mass-fiction genres, this professional specialization and role often is not recognized by publishers and scholars.[140]
Translation of science fiction accounts for the transnational nature of science fiction's repertoire of shared conventions andtropes. AfterWorld War II, many European countries were swept by a wave of translations from the English.[141][142] Due to the prominence of English as a source language, the use ofpseudonyms andpseudotranslations became common in countries such as Italy[137] and Hungary,[143] and English has often been used as avehicular language to translate from languages such as Chinese and Japanese.[144]
More recently, the international market in science-fiction translations has seen an increasing presence of source languages other than English.[144]
Technical translation renders documents whose useful lives are often limited – such as manuals, instruction sheets, internal memos, minutes, and financial reports – for a limited audience who are directly affected by the document. Thus, a user guide for a particular model of refrigerator is useful only for the refrigerator's owner and will remain useful only so long as that refrigerator model is in use. Similarly, software documentation generally pertains to a particular software, whose applications are used only by a certain class of users.[145]
Some translators need to entrust letters, debates, and similar texts in other languages and specialized fields to other translators in order to enhance the completeness of their work. For example, in the bookTarikh-e Alam-ara-ye Abbasi the translator collaborated with an Ottoman Turkish translator and a specialist in Islamic sciences to translate the work into English.[146] Some translators also need to travel to different countries for accurate translation and identification of geographical names. They sometimes seek assistance from specialists to read and translate certain difficult and illegible historical texts.[146]
Asurveyquestionnaire consists of a list of questions and answer categories aimed at extracting data from a particular group of people about their attitude, behavior, or knowledge. In cross-national and cross-culturalsurvey research, translation is crucial to collecting comparable data.[147][148] Originally developed for theEuropean Social Surveys, the model TRAPD (Translation, Review, Adjudication, Pretest, and Documentation) is now "widely used in the global survey research community, although not always labeled as such or implemented in its complete form".[149][150][151]
A team approach is recommended in the survey-translation process, to include translators, subject-matter experts, and persons helpful to the process.[152] For example, even when project managers and researchers do not speak the language of the translation, they know the study objectives well and the intent behind the questions, and therefore have a key role in improving the translation.[153] In addition, a survey-translation framework based onsociolinguistics states that a linguistically appropriate translation cannot be wholly sufficient to achieve the communicative effect of the source-language survey; the translation must also incorporate the social practices and cultural norms of the target language.[154]
^French philosopher and writerGilles Ménage (1613-92) commented on translations by humanist Perrot Nicolas d'Ablancourt (1606-64): "They remind me of a woman whom I greatly loved inTours, who was beautiful but unfaithful."[31]
^Cf. a supposed comment byWinston Churchill: "This is the type of pedantry up with which I will not put."
^"Interpretation" in this sense is to be distinguished from the function of an "interpreter" who translates orally or by the use ofsign language.
^Rebecca Armstrong writes: "A translator has to make choices; any word they choose will carry its own nuance, a particular set of interpretations, implications and associations. [Often the translator] need[s] to render the same [...] word differently in different contexts."[64]
^See "Poetry", below, for a similar observation concerning the occasional superiority of the translation over the original.
^Elsewhere Merwin recalls Pound saying: "[A]t your age you don't have anything to write about. You may think you do, but you don't. So get to work translating. TheProvençal is the real source...."[80]
^For example, inPolish, a "translation" is "przekład" or "tłumaczenie." Both "translator" and "interpreter" are "tłumacz." For a time in the 18th century, however, for "translator," some writers used a word, "przekładowca," that is no longer in use.[82]
^J.M. Cohen observes: "Scientific translation is the aim of an age that would reduce all activities totechniques. It is impossible however to imagine a literary-translation machine less complex than the human brain itself, with all its knowledge, reading, and discrimination."[93]
^For instance, Henry Benedict Mackey's translation ofSt. Francis de Sales's "Treatise on the Love of God" consistently omits the saint's analogies comparing God to a nursing mother, references to Bible stories such as the rape of Tamar, and so forth.
^MJC Warren, Lecturer in Biblical and Religious Studies,University of Sheffield, points out (more explicitly than Charles McNamara) that Luke gives a shorter version of Jesus's Lord's Prayer, leaving off the request that God "deliver us from evil"; that (as Charles McNamara also says) accurate translation is not the question here; and that the Bible records a number of incidents when God commands evil actions, such as thatAbraham kill his only son,Isaac (whose execution is canceled at the last moment).[124]
^abcdChristopher Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil", p. 83.
^abcdefKasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil", p. 84.
^Lydia 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.)
^Bakir, K.H. 1984. Arabization of Higher Education in Iraq. PhD thesis, University of Bath.
^Wakim, K.G. 1944. Arabic Medicine in Literature. Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 32 (1), January: 96-104.
^Hitti, P.K. 1970. History of the Arabs from the Earliest Times to the Present. 10th ed. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
^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.
^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.
^S.A. El Gabri,The Arab Experiment in Translation, New Delhi, India, Bookman’s Club, 1984.
^abChristopher de Bellaigue, "Dreams of Islamic Liberalism" (review of Marwa Elshakry,Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950, University of Chicago Press),The New York Review of Books, vol. LXII, no. 10 (June 4, 2015), p. 77.
^Malise Ruthven, "The Islamic Road to the Modern World" (review ofChristopher de Bellaigue,The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times, Liveright; and Wael Abu-'Uksa,Freedom in the Arab World: Concepts and Ideologies in Arabic Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press),The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 11 (22 June 2017), p. 22.
^Malise Ruthven, "The Islamic Road to the Modern World" (review ofChristopher de Bellaigue,The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times, Liveright; and Wael Abu-'Uksa,Freedom in the Arab World: Concepts and Ideologies in Arabic Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press),The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 11 (22 June 2017), p. 24.
^Gerard-Rene de Groot, "Translating legal information." Taken fromTranslation in Law, vol. 5 of theJournal of Legal Hermeneutics, pg. 132. Ed. Giuseppe Zaccaria.Hamburg: LIT Verlag Munster, 2000.ISBN9783825848620
^Czesław Miłosz,The History of Polish Literature, pp. 193–94.
^Kotrc RF, Walters KR. A bibliography of the Galenic Corpus. A newly researched list and arrangement of the titles of the treatises extant in Greek, Latin, and Arabic. Trans Stud Coll Physicians Phila. 1979 December;1(4):256–304.
^Walter Kaiser, "A Hero of Translation" (a review of Jean Findlay,Chasing Lost Time: The Life ofC.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator),The New York Review of Books, vol. LXII, no. 10 (4 June 2015), p. 55.
^Christopher Kasparek, translator's foreword toBolesław Prus,Pharaoh, translated from the Polish, with foreword and notes, by Christopher Kasparek,Amazon Kindlee-book, 2020, ASIN:BO8MDN6CZV.
^Gary Marcus, "Am I Human?: Researchers need new ways to distinguish artificial intelligence from the natural kind",Scientific American, vol. 316, no. 3 (March 2017), p. 63.
^Gary Marcus, "Am I Human?: Researchers need new ways to distinguish artificial intelligence from the natural kind",Scientific American, vol. 316, no. 3 (March 2017), p. 61.
^Michael Gorra, "Corrections of Taste" (review ofTerry Eagleton,Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read, Yale University Press, 323 pp.),The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIX, no. 15 (6 October 2022), p. 17.
^Merwin's introduction to his 2013Selected Translations, quoted byAnge Mlinko, "Whole Earth Troubador" (review ofThe Essential W.S. Merlin, edited byMichael Wiegers, Copper Canyon, 338 pp., 2017),The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 19 (7 December 2017), p. 45.
^Edward Balcerzan,Pisarze polscy o sztuce przekładu, 1440–1974: Antologia (Polish Writers on the Art of Translation, 1440–1974: an Anthology), 1977,passim.
^Hugh Thomas,Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes and the Fall of Old Mexico, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1993, pp. 171-72.
^Wilson, Emily, "The Pleasures of Translation" (review of Mark Polizzotti,Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, MIT Press, 2018, 182 pp.),The New York Review of Books, vol. LXV, no. 9 (24 May 2018), p. 47.
^Paul Taylor, "Insanely Complicated, Hopelessly Inadequate" (review ofBrian Cantwell Smith,The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment, MIT, October 2019,ISBN978 0 262 04304 5, 157 pp.;Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis,Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust, Ballantine, September 2019,ISBN978 1 5247 4825 8, 304 pp.;Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie,The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect, Penguin, May 2019,ISBN978 0 14 198241 0, 418 pp.),London Review of Books, vol. 43, no. 2 (21 January 2021), pp. 37–39. Paul Taylor quotation: p. 39.
^ʻAṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn (2017).The Conference of the Birds. translated by Sholeh Wolpé (First ed.). New York: W. W. Norton. p. 24.ISBN978-0-393-29218-3.OCLC951070853.
^Santos, Sherod (2000).A Poetry of Two Minds. Athens: University of Georgia Press. p. 107.ISBN0-8203-2204-0.OCLC43114993.
^Benjamin, Walter (1996–2003). Bullock, Marcus Paul; Jennings, Michael William (eds.).Selected Writings. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press. p. 256.ISBN978-0-674-00896-0.OCLC34705134.
^Gregory Hays, "Found in Translation" (review ofDenis Feeney,Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature, Harvard University Press),The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 11 (22 June 2017), p. 58.
^Jiří Levý,The Art of Translation, Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011, p. 122.
^abCarlson, Harry G. (1964). "Problems in Play Translation".Educational Theatre Journal.16 (1):55–58.doi:10.2307/3204378.JSTOR3204378.
^Jiří Levý,The Art of Translation, Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011, pp. 129-39.
^Jiří Levý,The Art of Translation, Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011, p. 129.
^Charles McNamara, "Lead Us Not into Temptation? Francis Is Not the First to Question a Key Phrase of the Lord's Prayer",Commonweal, 1 January 2018.[2]
^Farris, Michael (2007),From Tyndale to Madison, p. 37.
^abFatani, Afnan (2006). "Translation and the Qur'an". InLeaman, Oliver (ed.).The Qur'an: An Encyclopaedia. Routledge. pp. 657–669.ISBN978-0415775298.
^abFisher, Abigail (October 2020)."These lips that are not (d)one: Writing with the 'pash' of translation"(PDF).TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses.24 (2):1–25.Braschi and Acker employ certain techniques to produce writing that eschews fixed meaning in favour of facilitating the emergence of fluid and interpermeating textual resonances, as well as to establish a meta-discourse on the writing and translation process.
^Moreno Fernandez, Francisco (2020).Yo-Yo Boing! Or Literature as a Translingual Practice (Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: on the writings of Giannina Braschi). Aldama, Frederick Luis; Stavans, Ilan; O'Dwyer, Tess. Pittsburgh, Pa.: U Pittsburgh.ISBN978-0-8229-4618-2.OCLC1143649021.This epilinguistic awareness is apparent in the constant language games and in the way in which she so often plays with this translingual reality and with all the factors with which it contrasts and among which it moves so liquidly.
^Stanchich, Maritza.Bilingual Big Bang: Giannina Braschi's Trilogy Levels the Spanish-English Playing Field (Poets, Philosophers, Lovers). Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh. pp. 63–75.Carrión notes, the idea of an only tongue ruling over a considerable number of different nations and peoples is fundamentally questioned.
^Kaindl, Klaus; Spitzel, Karlheinz (2014).Transfiction: Research into the Realities of Translation Fiction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 345–362.ISBN9789027270733.OCLC868285393.
^Iannuzzi, Giulia (2019).Un laboratorio di fantastici libri. Riccardo Valla intellettuale, editore, traduttore. Con un'appendice di lettere inedite a cura di Luca G. Manenti. Chieti (Italy).ISBN9788833051031.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^abIannuzzi, Giulia (2015). "The Translation of East Asian Science Fiction in Italy: An Essay on Chinese and Japanese Science Fiction, Anthological Practices and Publishing Strategies beyond the Anglo-American Canon".Quaderni di Cultura.12:85–108.doi:10.5281/zenodo.3604992.
Baker, Mona; Saldanha, Gabriela (2008).Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. New York: Routledge.ISBN9780415369305.
Balcerzan, Edward, ed. (1977).Pisarze polscy o sztuce przekładu, 1440–1974: Antologia [Polish Writers on the Art of Translation, 1440–1974: an Anthology] (in Polish). Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie.OCLC4365103.
Berman, Antoine (1984).L'épreuve de l'étranger: culture et traduction dans l'Allemagne romantique: Herder, Goethe, Schlegel, Novalis, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin (in French). Paris: Gallimard, Essais.ISBN9782070700769. Excerpted in English inVenuti, Lawrence (2004) [2002].The translation studies reader (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.ISBN9780415319201.
Davis, Lydia, "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.)
Gleick, James, "The Fate of Free Will" (review of Kevin J. Mitchell,Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, Princeton University Press, 2023, 333 pp.),The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXI, no. 1 (18 January 2024), pp. 27–28, 30.
Gorra, Michael, "Corrections of Taste" (review ofTerry Eagleton,Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read, Yale University Press, 323 pp.),The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIX, no. 15 (6 October 2022), pp. 16–18.
Hays, Gregory, "Found in Translation" (review ofDenis Feeney,Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature, Harvard University Press),The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 11 (22 June 2017), pp. 56, 58.
Kaiser, Walter, "A Hero of Translation" (a review of Jean Findlay,Chasing Lost Time: The Life ofC.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 351 pp., $30.00),The New York Review of Books, vol. LXII, no. 10 (4 June 2015), pp. 54–56.
Lauren Kane, "Translating from Troy to Ithaca", an interview, in the 10 May 2025New York Review of Books email newsletter, withDaniel Mendelsohn about his English rendition ofHomer'sOdyssey published in April 2025.
Kasparek, Christopher, translator's foreword toBolesław Prus,Pharaoh, translated from the Polish, with foreword and notes, by Christopher Kasparek,Amazon Kindlee-book, 2020, ASIN:BO8MDN6CZV.
Kelly, Louis (1979).The true interpreter: A history of translation theory and practice in the West. New York: St. Martin's Press.ISBN9780631196402.
Link, Perry, "A Magician of Chinese Poetry" (review ofEliot Weinberger, with an afterword byOctavio Paz,19 Ways of Looking atWang Wei (with More Ways), New Directions, 88 pp., $10.95 [paper]; and Eliot Weinberger,The Ghosts of Birds, New Directions, 211 pp., $16.95 [paper]),The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIII, no. 18 (24 November 2016), pp. 49–50.
Marcus, Gary, "Am I Human?: Researchers need new ways to distinguishartificial intelligence from the natural kind",Scientific American, vol. 316, no. 3 (March 2017), pp. 58–63.Multiple tests of artificial-intelligence efficacy are needed because, "just as there is no single test ofathletic prowess, there cannot be one ultimate test ofintelligence." One such test, a "Construction Challenge", would test perception and physical action—"two important elements of intelligent behavior that were entirely absent from the originalTuring test." Another proposal has been to give machines the same standardized tests of science and other disciplines that schoolchildren take. A so far insuperable stumbling block to artificial intelligence is an incapacity for reliabledisambiguation. "[V]irtually every sentence [that people generate] isambiguous, often in multiple ways." A prominent example is known as the "pronoun disambiguation problem": a machine has no way of determining to whom or what apronoun in a sentence—such as "he", "she" or "it"—refers.
McNamara, Charles, "Lead Us Not into Temptation? Francis Is Not the First to Question a Key Phrase of the Lord's Prayer",Commonweal, 1 January 2018.[3]
Piron, Claude (1994).Le défi des langues: du gâchis au bon sens [The language challenge: from chaos to common sense] (in French). Paris: L'Harmattan.ISBN9782738424327.
Polizzotti, Mark,Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, MIT, 168 pp., 2018,ISBN978 0 262 03799 0.
Rose, Marilyn Gaddis (January 1980).Translation: agent of communication: an international review of arts and ideas (volume 5, issue 1, special issue). Hamilton, New Zealand: Outrigger Publishers.OCLC224073589.
Ruthven, Malise, Islam in the World, Granta, 2006, ISBN 978-1-86207-906-9.
Ruthven, Malise, "The Islamic Road to the Modern World" (review ofChristopher de Bellaigue,The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times, Liveright; and Wael Abu-'Uksa,Freedom in the Arab World: Concepts and Ideologies in Arabic Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press),The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 11 (22 June 2017), pp. 22, 24–25.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich (2004) [2002], "On the different methods of translating (Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens 1813)", inVenuti, Lawrence (ed.),The translation studies reader, translated by Bernofsky, Susan (2nd ed.), New York: Routledge, pp. 43–63,ISBN9780415319201.
Simms, Norman T. (1983).Nimrod's sin: treason and translation in a multilingual world (volume 8, issue 2). Hamilton, New Zealand: Outrigger Publishers.OCLC9719326.
Tatarkiewicz, Władysław,O doskonałości (On Perfection), Warsaw, Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1976; English translation by Christopher Kasparek subsequently serialized inDialectics and Humanism: The Polish Philosophical Quarterly, vol. VI, no. 4 (autumn 1979)—vol. VIII, no 2 (spring 1981), and reprinted inWładysław Tatarkiewicz,On Perfection, Warsaw University Press, Center of Universalism, 1992, pp. 9–51 (the book is a collection of papers by and about Professor Tatarkiewicz).
Taylor, Paul, "Insanely Complicated, Hopelessly Inadequate" (review ofBrian Cantwell Smith,The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment, MIT, October 2019,ISBN978 0 262 04304 5, 157 pp.;Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis,Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust, Ballantine, September 2019,ISBN978 1 5247 4825 8, 304 pp.;Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie,The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect, Penguin, May 2019,ISBN978 0 14 198241 0, 418 pp.),London Review of Books, vol. 43, no. 2 (21 January 2021), pp. 37–39.
Warner, Marina, "The Politics of Translation" (a review of Kate Briggs,This Little Art, 2017; Mireille Gansel,Translation as Transhumance, translated byRos Schwartz, 2017; Mark Polizzotti,Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, 2018;Boyd Tonkin, ed.,The 100 Best Novels in Translation, 2018;Clive Scott,The Work of Literary Translation, 2018),London Review of Books, vol. 40, no. 19 (11 October 2018), pp. 21–24.
Wilson, Emily, "Ah, how miserable!" (review of three separate translations ofThe Oresteia byAeschylus: byOliver Taplin, Liveright, November 2018; by Jeffrey Scott Bernstein, Carcanet, April 2020; and by David Mulroy, Wisconsin, April 2018),London Review of Books, vol. 42, no. 19 (8 October 2020), pp. 9–12, 14.
Wilson, Emily, "The Pleasures of Translation" (review of Mark Polizzotti,Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, MIT Press, 2018, 182 pp.),The New York Review of Books, vol. LXV, no. 9 (24 May 2018), pp. 46–47.
Pamela Crossley, "We possess all things" (review ofHenrietta Harrison,The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire, Princeton, 2022,ISBN978 0 691 22545 6, 341 pp.),London Review of Books, vol. 44, no. 16 (18 August 2022), pp. 31–32. "Historians have fastened their attention on the letters that passed fromGeorge III to theQianlong emperor and back again. But ... written texts are not so fixed as one might assume. Neither the Chinese nor the British officials read the originals of the messages from the other side; they were content to receive translations... In such circumstances ... meanings become elusive. More than king, emperor or ambassador, the translators decided the substance of the exchange. Historians have tended to attribute meaning to the speakers and not to their humble interpreters. But ... it was the intermediaries – ambassadors, negotiators, translators – who delivered the meanings. The important persons in this process were those in between." (p. 32.)
Rudolf Flesch,The Art of Clear Thinking, chapter 5: "Danger! Language at Work" (pp. 35–42), chapter 6: "The Pursuit of Translation" (pp. 43–50), Barnes & Noble Books, 1973.
Kenna Hughes-Castleberry, "A Murder Mystery Puzzle: The literary puzzleCain's Jawbone, which has stumped humans for decades, reveals the limitations of natural-language-processing algorithms",Scientific American, vol. 329, no. 4 (November 2023), pp. 81–82. "This murder mystery competition has revealed that although NLP (natural-language processing) models are capable of incredible feats, their abilities are very much limited by the amount ofcontext they receive. This [...] could cause [difficulties] for researchers who hope to use them to do things such as analyzeancient languages. In some cases, there are few historical records on long-gonecivilizations to serve astraining data for such a purpose." (p. 82.)
Kelly, Nataly; Zetzsche, Jost (2012).Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World. TarcherPerigee.ISBN978-0399537974.
Moore, A. W., "A Tove on the Table" (review of 3 translations of Ludwig Wittgenstein'sTractatus Logico-Philosophicus: byMichael Beaney, Oxford, May 2023,ISBN978 0 19 886137 9, 100 pp.; byAlexander Booth, Penguin, December 2023,ISBN978 0 241 68195 4, 94 pp.; byDamion Searls, Norton, April 2024,ISBN978 1 324 09243 8, 181 pp.),London Review of Books, vol. 46, no. 15 (1 August 2024), pp. 31-35. "[T]he[David] Pears/[Brian] McGuinness [second, 1961 English] translation has one compelling claim to retain its status as the standard, namely ... its wonderful index. That said, I strongly recommend thatanglophone students of this work get hold of Beaney's and Booth's translations too – and maybe Searls's, but they will need to treat the last with a great deal of caution." (p. 35.)
Nabokov, Vladimir (4 August 1941)."The Art of Translation".The New Republic. Retrieved19 January 2020.
Allison Parshall, "Pain Language: The sound of 'ow' transcends borders",Scientific American, vol. 332, no. 2 (February 2025), pp. 16–18. "Manylanguages have aninterjection word for expressing pain. [Katarzyna Pisanskiet al., writing in theJournal of the Acoustical Society of America, have] found that pain interjections tend to contain thevowel sound 'ah' (written as [a] in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet) and letter combinations that incorporate it, such as 'ow' and 'ai.' These patterns may point back to the origins of human language itself." (p. 16.) "Researchers are continually discovering cases ofsymbolism, or soundiconicity, in which a word's intrinsic nature has some connection to its meaning. These cases run counter to decades oflinguistic theory, which had regarded language as fundamentally arbitrary... [Many wordsonomatopoeically imitate a sound. Also] there's the'bouba-kiki' effect, whereby people from varying cultures are more likely to associate the nonsense word 'bouba' with a rounded shape and 'kiki' with a spiked one.... [S]omehow we all have afeeling about this,' says Aleksandra Ćwiek ... [She and her colleagues have] show[n] that people associate thetrilled 'R' sound with roughness and the 'L' sound with smoothness.Mark Dingemanse ... in 2013 found [that] the conversational 'Huh?' and similar words in other languages may be universal." (p. 18.)
Flora Ross Amos, "Early Theories of Translation",Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature, 1920. AtProject Gutenberg.
Judith Thurman, "Mother Tongue: Emily Wilson makes Homer modern",The New Yorker, September 11, 2023, pp. 46–53. A biography, and presentation of the translation theories and practices, ofEmily Wilson. "'As a translator, I was determined to make the whole human experience of the poems accessible,' Wilson said." (p. 47.)
Marion Turner, "Stop talking englissh [sic]" (review ofZrinka Stahuljak,Fixers: Agency, Translation and the Early Global History of Literature, Chicago, February 2024,ISBN978 0 226 83039 1, 345 pp.),London Review of Books, vol. 46, no. 9 (9 May 2024), p. 13. "The 'fixer' is a slippery figure: Stahuljak, who used to work as an interpreter in war zones, uses the term by analogy with the local interpreters-guides-brokers who make it possible for modern journalists to function in alien terrain. She emphasises that the work they do as interpreters – just one of the many ways in which they enable networks of exchange – is more creative than we might assume. Medieval writers, readers and travellers understood translation as a dynamic process, something that has been obscured by the later emphasis on the value of theoriginal text and its author."
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