A short history of translation and translators

At the time, dictionaries and thesauri were not regarded as adequate guides for translators. In his “Essay on the Principles of Translation” (1791), Scottish historian Alexander Fraser Tytler emphasised that assiduous reading was more helpful than the use of dictionaries. Polish poet and grammarian Onufry Andrzej Kopczyński expressed the same views a few years earlier (in 1783), while adding the need to listen to the spoken language.

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  At the time, dictionaries and thesauri were not regarded as adequate guides for translators. In his “Essay on the Principles of Translation” (1791), Scottish historian Alexander Fraser Tytler emphasised that assiduous reading was more helpful than the use of dictionaries. Polish poet and grammarian Onufry Andrzej Kopczyński expressed the same views a few years earlier (in 1783), while adding the need to listen to the spoken language.
  
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  Polish encyclopedist Ignacy Krasicki described the translator’s special role in society in his posthumous essay “On Translating Books” (“O tłumaczeniu ksiąg”, 1803). Krasicki was also a novelist, poet, fabulist and translator. In his essay, he wrote that “translation is in fact an art both estimable and very difficult, and therefore is not the labour and portion of common minds; it should be practised 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 their country.”
  

In the 19th century

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  In the 19th century
  
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  There were new standards for accuracy and style. For accuracy, the policy became “the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text (except for bawdy passages), with the addition of extensive explanatory footnotes” (in J.M. Cohen, “Translation” entry in “Encyclopedia Americana”, 1986, vol. 27). For style, the aim was to constantly remind readers that they were reading a foreign classic.
  
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  An exception was the translation and adaptation of Persian poems by Edward FitzGerald, an English writer and poet. His book “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám” (1859) offered a selection of poems by Omar Khayyám, an 11th-century poet, mathematician and astronomer. FitzGerald’s free translation from Arabic to English has stayed the most famous translation of Khayyám’s poems to this day, despite more recent and accurate translations.
  
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  The “non-transparent” translation theory was first developed by German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher, a major figure in German Romanticism. In his seminal lecture “On the Different Methods of Translating” (1813), Schleiermacher distinguished between translation methods that moved the writer towards the reader, i.e. transparency, and those that moved the reader toward the author, i.e. an extreme fidelity to the foreignness of the source text. Schleiermacher favoured the latter approach. His distinction between “domestication” (bringing the author to the reader) and “foreignisation” (taking the reader to the author) inspired prominent theorists in the 20th century, for example Antoine Berman and Lawrence Venuti.