A short history of translation and translators

In the 15th century

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  In the 15th century
  
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  The trip of Byzantine pilosopher Gemistus Pletho to Florence, Italy, pioneered the revival of Greek learning in western Europe. Pletho reintroduced Plato’s thought during the 1438-39 Council of Florence. During the Council, Pletho met Cosimo de Medici, the ruler of Florence and its patron of learning and the arts, which led to the foundation of the Platonic Academy. Under the leadership of Italian scholar and translator Marsilio Ficino, the Platonic Academy took over the translation into Latin of all Plato’s works, philosopher Plotinus’ “Enneads” and other Neoplatonist works.
  
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  Ficino’s work — and Erasmus’ Latin edition of the New Testament — led to a new attitude to translation. For the first time, readers demanded rigour in rendering the exact words of Plato and Jesus (and Aristotle and others) as a ground for their philosophical and religious beliefs.
  
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  A “fine” work of English prose was Thomas Malory’s “Le Morte d’Arthur” (1485), a free translation of Arthurian romances, with legendary King Arthur and his companions Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table. Malory translated and adapted existing French and English stories while adding original material, for example the “Gareth” story as one of the stories of the Knights of the Round Table.
  

In the 16th century

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  In the 16th century
  
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  Non-scholarly literature continued to rely heavily on adaptation. Tudor poets and Elizabethan translators adapted themes by Horace, Ovid, Petrarch and others, while inventing a new poetic style. The poets and translators wanted to supply a new audience — created from the rise of a middle class and the development of printing — with “works such as the original authors would have written, had they been writing in England in that day” (Wikipedia).
  
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  The “Tyndale New Testament” (1525) was regarded as the first great Tudor translation, named after William Tyndale, the English scholar who was its main translator. For the first time, the Bible was directly translated from Hebrew and Greek texts. After translating the whole New Testament, Tyndale began translating the Old Testament, and translated half of it. He became a leading figure in the Protestant Reformation before being sentenced to death for the unlicensed possession of the Scripture in English. After his death, one of his assistants completed the translation of the Old Testament. The “Tyndale Bible” became the first mass-produced English translation of the Bible on the printing press.
  
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  Martin Luther, a German professor of theology and a seminal figure in the Protestant Reformation, translated the Bible into German in his later life. The “Luther Bible” (1522-34) had lasting effects on religion. The disparities in the translation of crucial words and passages contributed to some extent to the split of western Christianity into Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. The publication of the “Luther Bible” also contributed to the development of the modern German language.
  
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  Luther was the first European scholar to assess that one translates satisfactorily only towards one’s own language, a bold statement that became the norm two centuries later.