The History of Translation

The need for translation has existed since time immemorial and translating important literary works from one language into others has contributed significantly to the development of world culture. Ideas and forms of one culture have constantly moved and got assimilated into other cultures through the works of translators. The history of translation is related to the history of the often invisible cross cultural interactions of the world. Ideas and concepts from the East notably India, China and Iraq have influenced the Western culture since as early as sixth century B.C. when trade ties were first established between India and the Mediterranean countries. Many medical theories of Plato and Galen of Greece had considerable influence from those of India.

Many of the philosophical and scientific works of ancient Greece were rendered into Arabic as early as ninth century A.D. This knowledge spread to Europe via Spain which was a predominantly a Muslim country then. The school of translators of Toledo in Spain established by Alfonso VI of Castile and Leon in 1085 AD was responsible for translations from Arabic to Latin and then to Spanish these scientific and technological work which later led to the European Renaissance. Despite their key contributions, ancient translators have often remained unknown or in the background and the credit due to them have not been acknowledged. They have done their job with painstaking efforts despite many violent conflicts that have dotted throughout history.

 Translators have enabled Holy Scriptures like the Bible written in esoteric languages like Latin to be understood by ordinary people by translating them into more common languages without depending on a few elite priests or the members of clergy to explain what they contained. Some translators even had to pay with their life for doing it like the famous Bible translators Willaim Tyndale who was arrested and executed in Holland by the king in 1536 for translating the Bible from its original languages into the common vernacular of English.

Chinese monk Xuanzang is supposed to have translated 74 volumes of Buddhist scriptures originating from India in to Chinese in 645 AD. One of the earliest recorded translations of considerable effort in English is perhaps the translation of the Bible around 1100 AD.

British translator Constance Garnett made the translating community proud through her brilliant translations of Russian classics including those of Turgenev, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoyevski in late 19th century. Another famous translator is Gregory Rabassa who has translated many Latin American fictions into English. Dr. Arthur Waley is one of the world’s foremost translators of the twentieth century of Chinese and Japanese literature into English. More recently Gladys Yang translated many Chinese classics into English over the last 50 years. Thus translators have made important contribution over the centuries in dissemination of ideas and information to a larger audience, in shaping of cultures and in a sense helped unite the world.

Nineteenth Century Spiders

Nineteenth Century Spiders

Back when I was translating Friedrich Schleiermacher‘s great essay on translation, which dates from 1813/15, I spent a lot of time reading around in Samuel Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Coleridge is such a wonderful prose stylist, and I used him as a resource for my translation. In particular, I looked at how he put his sentences together, what sorts of opening gambits he used to introduce ideas, and I borrowed a phrase here, a structure there, just enough to mark my translation of Schleiermacher as belonging to an earlier period. I wasn’t trying to “fake” an older text, but to keep the reader aware that this text belonged to the early 19th century. I was inspired to do this after reading an earlier translation of the same essay by Douglas Robinson that throws around 20th century translation theory terminology like “source language” and “target language,” with the result that Schleiermacher winds up sounding hideously naive. Reading Schleiermacher in this translation, I found myself wondering why he was writing as if he’d never heard of Saussure.

So now I’m just starting work on a wonderful horror story from the 19th century, Jeremias Gotthelf’s «Die schwarze Spinne» (The Black Spider), which will be published next year by New York Review Books Classics. This is one of the most frightening stories I’ve ever read. In it, a young woman brings calamity to her community by accidentally – oops – promising a newborn to the Devil. Gotthelf was a minister, and I get the feeling he wrote the story to frighten his congregation into keeping the faith. The spider of the title is like Freddy in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies – it’s everywhere at once, it can be as big as a cottage or disintegrate into a swarm of infinitesimally tiny beasties. It is the embodiment of everything in us that is wicked or weak. Did I mention than I am pretty severely arachnophobic? I still remember the giant-spider nightmares I had as a child. So this is the worst possible, i.e. the perfect book for me to translate. I’m hoping that my fear will make the descriptions of the spider particularly graphic. We shall see. Meanwhile, I’m priming myself for the project by reading up on some period literature. I started with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, which is gothic in all the worst ways but quite nicely written on the sentence level, which makes it a good model for me. And now I am rereading one of my favorite books of all time, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and keeping a log of useful phrases that might help me with Gotthelf. Here are some of them: “the want of,” “repair the faults of,” “he is remarkable for,” “made me desirous to,” “unallied to the dross of human nature,” “madly desirous of,” “compassed round by,” “body forth,” “obliged us to the inclemency,” “I might have X but that Y,” “yet he might [=could] not have X, had she not Y.”

It’s astonishing to me how much the English language has changed in the last 200 years. These phrases now seem so quaint by contemporary standards. And I’ll have to be careful not to use too many of them in the translation – just enough to signal to the reader that the story she is reading comes to us from another age.

Source:  http://translationista.com.s228552.gridserver.com/2011/06/hello-nineteenth-century.html