A short history of translation and translators

A short history of translation and translators

A short history of translation and translators

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  By Marie Lebert, 25 October 2020.
  
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  Translators have always played a major role in society. Early medieval translators contributed to the development of modern languages and national identities around these languages. Translators went on playing a major role in the advancement of society for centuries. After being highly regarded alongside literary, academic and scientific authors for two millennia, many translators have become invisible in the 21st century. It is time to acknowledge again the translators’ major impact on society — past and present. This essay was written with the help of Wikipedia. [related works]
  

In antiquity

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  In antiquity
  
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  The translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek in the 3rd century BCE is regarded as the first major translation in the western world. Most Jews had forgotten Hebrew, their ancestral language, and needed the Bible to be available in Greek to be able to read it. This translation is known as the “Septuagint”, a name that refers to the seventy scholars who were commissioned to translate the Hebrew Bible in Alexandria, Egypt. Each translator worked in solitary confinement in his own cell, and according to legend all seventy versions proved identical.
  
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  The translator’s role as a bridge for “carrying across” values between cultures has been discussed since Terence, a Roman playwright who translated and adapted Greek comedies into Latin in the 2nd century BCE.
  
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  Cicero famously cautioned against translating “word for word” (“verbum pro verbo”) in “On the Orator” (“De Oratore”, 55 BCE): “I did not think I ought to count them [the words] out to the reader like coins, but to pay them by weight, as it were.” Cicero, a statesman, orator, lawyer and philosopher, was also a translator from Greek to Latin, and compared the translator to an artist.