A short history of translation and translators

In the 18th century

• In the 18th century
• According to Johann Gottfried Herder, a German literary critic and language theorist, a translator should translate towards (and not from) his own language, a statement already made two centuries earlier by Martin Luther, who was the first European scholar to express such views. In his “Treatise on the Origin of Language” (1772), Herder established the foundations of comparative philology.
• But there was still not much concern for accuracy. “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 texts should be made to conform to it in translation. Even for scholarship, except for the translation of the Bible, they cared no more than had their predecessors, and did not shrink from making translations from languages they hardly knew” (Wikipedia).