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.

• 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.
• 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.”