History of translation

The first important translation in the West was that of the Septuagint, a collection of Jewish Scriptures translated into Koine Greek in Alexandria between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE. The dispersed Jws had forgotten their ancestral language and needed Greek versions of their Scriptures. Throughout the Middle Ages, Latin was the “lingua franca” of the western learned world. The 9th century Alfred the Great, king of Wessex in England, was far ahead of his time in commissioning vernacular Anglo-Saxon translations of Bede's Ecclesiastical History and Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. Meanwhile the Christian Church frowned on even partial adaptations of the standard Latin Bible, St.Jerome's Vulgate. In Asia, the spread of Buddhism led to large-scale ongoing translation efforts spanning well over a thousand years. The Tangut Empire was especially efficient in such efforts; exploiting the then newly-invented block printing, and with the full support of the government (contemporary sources describe the Emperor and his mother personally contributing to the translation effort, alongside sages of various nationalities), the Tanguts took mere decades to translate volumes that had taken the Chinese centuries to render. Large-scale efforts at translation were undertaken by the Arabs. Having conquered the Greek world, they made Arabic versions of its philosophical and scientific works. During the Middle Ages, some translations of these Arabic versions were made into Latin, chiefly at Cordoba in Spain. Such Latin translations of Greek and original Arab works of scholarship and science would help advance the development of European Scholasticism. The broad historic trends in Western translation practice may be illustrated on the example of translation into the English language. The first fine translation into English were made by England's first great poet, the 14th century Geoffrey Chaucer, who adapted from Italian of Giovanni Boccaccio in his own Knight's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde; began a translation of the French language Roman de la Rose; and completed a translation of Boethius from the Latin. Chaucer founded an English poetic tradition on adaptations and translations from those earlier-established literary languages. The first great English translation was the Wycliffe Bible, which showed the weaknesses of an underdeveloped English prose. Only at the end of the 15th century would the great age of English prose translation begin with Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur - an adaptation of Arthurian ramances so free that it can, in fact, hardly be called a true translation. The first great Tudor translations are, accordingly, the Tyndale New Testament (1525), which would influence the Authorized Version (1611), and Lord Berners' version of Jean Froissart's Chronicles (1523-25). Meanwhile, in Renaissance Italy, a new period in the history of translation had opened in Florence with the arrival, at the court of Cosimo de' Medici, of the Byzantine scholar Georgius Gemistus Pletho shortly before the fall of Constantinople to the Turks (1453). A Latin translation of Plato's works was undertaken by Marsilio Ficino. This and Erasmus' Latin edition of the New Testament led to a new attitude to translation. For the first time, readers demanded rigor of rendering, as philosophical and religious beliefs depended on the exact words of Plato, Aristotle and Jesus. The Elizabethan period of translation saw considerable progress beyond mere paraphrase toward an ideal of stylistic equivalence, but even to the end of this period - which actually reached to the middle of the 17th century - there was no concern for verbal accuracy. In the second half of the 17th century, the poet John Dryden sought to make Virgil speak “in words such as he would probably have written if he were living and an Englishman”. Dryden, however, discerned no need to emulate the Roman port's subtlety and concision. Similarly, Homer suffered from Alexander Pope's endeavor to reduce the greek poet's “wild paradise” to order. 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 text 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 of James Macpherson's “translations” of Ossian - from texts that were actually of the “translator's” own composition. The 19th century brought new standards of accuracy and style. In regard to accuracy, observes J.M.Cohen, the policy became “the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text”, except for any bawdy passages and the addition of copious explanotory footnotes. In regard to style, the Victorians' aim, achieved through far-reaching metaphrase or pseudo-metaphrase, was to constantly remind readers that they were reading a foreign classic. An exception was the outstanding translation in this period. Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859), which achieved its Oriental Flavor largely by using Persian names and discreet Biblical echoes and actually drew little of its material from the Persian original. In advance of the 20th century, a new pattern was set in 1871 by Benjamin Jowett, who translated Plato into simple, straightforward language. Jowett's example was not followed, however, until well into the new century, when accuracy rather than style became the principal criterion.

History of theory

Discussions of the theory and practice of translation reach back into antiquity and show remarkable continuities. The distinction that had been drawn by the ancient Greeks between "metaphrase" ("literal" translation) and "paraphrase" would be adopted by the English poet and translator John Dryden (1631-1700), who represented translation as the judicious blending of these two modes of phrasing when selecting, in the target language, "counterparts," or equivalents, for the expressions used in the source language: 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. Dryden cautioned, however, against the license of "imitation," i.e. of adapted translation: "When a painter copies from the life... he has no privilege to alter features and lineaments..." This general formulation of the central concept of translation -- equivalence -- is probably as adequate as any that has been proposed ever since Cicero and Horace, in first-century-BCE Rome, famously and literally cautioned against translating "word for word" ("verbum pro verbo"). Despite occasional theoretical diversities, the actual practice of translators has hardly changed since antiquity. Except for some extreme metaphrasers in the early Christian period and the Middle Ages, and adapters in various periods (especially pre-Classical Rome, and the 18th century), translators have generally shown prudent flexibility in seeking equivalents -- "literal" where possible, paraphrastic where necessary -- for the original meaning and other crucial "values" (e.g., style, verse form, concordance with musical accompaniment or, in films, with speech articulatory movements) as determined from context. In general, translators have sought to preserve the context itself by reproducing the original order of sememes, and hence word order -- when necessary, reinterpreting the actual grammatical structure. The grammatical differences between "fixed-word-order" languages (e.g., English, French, German) and "free-word-order" languages (e.g., Greek, Latin, Polish, Russian) have been no impediment in this regard. When a target language has lacked terms that are found in a source language, translators have borrowed them, thereby enriching the target language. Thanks in great measure to the exchange of calques and loanwords between languages, and to their importation from other languages, there are few concepts that are "untranslatable" among the modern European languages. In general, the greater the contact and exchange that has existed between two languages, or between both and a third one, the greater is the ratio of metaphrase to paraphrase that may be used in translating between them. However, due to shifts in "ecological niches" of words, a common etymology is sometimes misleading as a guide to current meaning in one or the other language. The English "actual," for example, should not be confused with the cognate French "actuel" (meaning "present," "current") or the Polish "aktualny" ("present," "current"). The translator's role as a bridge for "carrying across" values between cultures has been discussed at least since Terence, Roman adapter of Greek comedies, in the second century BCE. The translator's role is, however, by no means a passive and mechanical one, and so has also been compared to that of an artist. The main ground seems to be the concept of parallel creation found in critics as early as Cicero. Dryden observed that "Translation is a type of drawing after life..." Comparison of the translator with a musician or actor goes back at least to Samuel Johnson's remark about Alexander Pope playing Homer on a flageolet, while Homer himself used a bassoon. If translation be an art, it is no easy one. In the 13th century, Roger Bacon wrote that if a translation is to be true, the translator must know both languages, as well as the science that he is to translate; and finding that few translators did, he wanted to do away with translation and translators altogether. The first European to assume that one translates satisfactorily only toward his own language may have been Martin Luther, translator of the Bible into German. According to L.G. Kelly, since Johann Gottfried Herder in the 18th century, "it has been axiomatic" that one works only toward his own language.Compounding these demands upon the translator is the fact that not even the most complete dictionary or thesaurus can ever be a fully adequate guide in translation. Alexander Tytler, in his Essay on the Principles of Translation (1790), emphasized that assiduous reading is a more comprehensive guide to a language than are dictionaries. The same point, but also including listening to the spoken language, had earlier been made in 1783 by Onufry Andrzej Kopczyсski, member of Poland's Society for Elementary Books, who was called "the last Latin poet." The special role of the translator in society was well described in an essay, published posthumously in 1803, by Ignacy Krasicki - “Poland's La Fontaine”, Primate of Poland, poet, encyclopedist, author of the first Polish novel, and translator from French and Greek: Translation… is in fact an art both estimable and very difficult, and therefore is not the labor and portion of common minds; It should be practiced by those who are themselves capable of being actors, when they see greater use in translating the works of others than in their own works, and hold higher than their own glory the service that they render to their country.

Страницы: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5