Translation
Translation in the field of language is the communication of the meaning of a [|source-language] text by means of an equivalent [|target-language] text. The English language draws a terminological distinction between translating and interpreting ; under this distinction, translation can begin only after the appearance of writing within a language community.
A translator always risks inadvertently introducing source-language words, grammar, or syntax into the target-language rendering. On the other hand, such "spill-overs" have sometimes imported useful source-language calques and loanwords that have enriched target languages.
Because of the laboriousness of the translation process, since the 1940s efforts have been made, with varying degrees of success, to automate translation or to mechanically aid the human translator. More recently, the rise of the Internet has fostered a world-wide market for translation services and has facilitated "language localisation".
Etymology
The word for the concept of "translation", in English and some other European languages, stems from the Latin noun translatio, formed from the adverb trans, "across", and -latio, derived from latus, the past participle of the verb ferre, to "carry" or "bring". Thus, the Latin noun translatio and its cognate modern derivatives mean the "bringing across" of a text from one language to another.In some other European languages, the word for the concept of "translation" stems from another Latin noun, trāductiō, derived from the verb, "bring across", formed from the adverb trans, "across", and dūcō, to "lead" or "bring".
The Ancient Greek term for "translation" has supplied English with "metaphrase", as contrasted with "paraphrase". "Metaphrase" corresponds in one of the more recent terminologies to [|formal equivalence], and "paraphrase" to [|dynamic equivalence].
The concept of metaphrase is an imperfect concept, because a given word in a given language often carries more than one meaning, and because a similar given meaning may often be represented in a given language by more than one word. Nevertheless, metaphrase and paraphrase may be useful as ideal concepts that mark the extremes in the spectrum of possible approaches to translation.
See also the entry for translation at Wiktionary.
Theories
Western theory
Discussions of the theory and practice of translation reach back into antiquity and show remarkable continuities. The ancient Greeks distinguished between metaphrase and paraphrase. This distinction was adopted by English poet and translator John Dryden, who described translation as the judicious blending of these two modes of phrasing when selecting, in the target language, "counterparts," or equivalents, for the expressions used in the source language:Dryden cautioned, however, against the licence of "imitation", i.e. of adapted translation: "When a painter copies from the life... he has no privilege to alter features and lineaments..."
This general formulation of the central concept of translation—equivalence—is as adequate as any that has been proposed since Cicero and Horace, who, in 1st-century-BCE Rome, famously and literally cautioned against translating word for word.
Despite occasional theoretical diversity, the actual practice of translation has hardly changed since antiquity. Except for some extreme metaphrasers in the early Christian period and the Middle Ages and adapters in various periods, translators have generally shown prudent flexibility in seeking equivalents—"literal" where possible, paraphrastic where necessary—for the original meaning and other crucial "values" as determined from context.
In general translators have sought to preserve the context itself by reproducing the original order of sememes, and hence word order—when necessary, reinterpreting the actual grammatical structure, for example, by shifting from active to passive voice, or vice versa. The grammatical differences between "fixed-word-order" languages and "free-word-order" languages have been no impediment in this regard. The particular syntax characteristics of the text of a source language are adjusted to the syntactic requirements of the target language.
When a target language has lacked terms that are found in a source language, translators have borrowed those terms, thereby enriching the target language. Thanks in great measure to the exchange of calques and loanwords between languages, and to their importation from other languages, there are few concepts that are "untranslatable" among the modern European languages. A greater problem, however, is translating terms relating to cultural concepts that have no equivalent in the target language. For full comprehension, such situations require the provision of a gloss.
Generally, the greater the contact and exchange that have existed between two languages, or between those languages and a third one, the greater is the ratio of metaphrase to paraphrase that may be used in translating among them. However, due to shifts in ecological niches of words, a common etymology is sometimes misleading as a guide to current meaning in one or the other language. For example, the English actual should not be confused with the cognate French actuel, the Polish aktualny, the Swedish aktuell, the Russian актуальный or the Dutch actueel.
The translator's role as a bridge for "carrying across" values between cultures has been discussed at least since Terence, the 2nd-century-BCE Roman adapter of Greek comedies. The translator's role is, however, by no means a passive, mechanical one, and so has also been compared to that of an artist. The main ground seems to be the concept of parallel creation found in critics such as Cicero. Dryden observed that "Translation is a type of drawing after life..." Comparison of the translator with a musician or actor goes back at least to Samuel Johnson's remark about Alexander Pope playing Homer on a flageolet, while Homer himself used a bassoon.
The translator of the Bible into German, Martin Luther, is credited with being the first European to posit that one translates satisfactorily only toward his own language. L.G. Kelly states that since Johann Gottfried Herder in the 18th century "it has been axiomatic" that one translates only toward his own language.
Compounding the demands on the translator is the fact that no dictionary or thesaurus can ever be a fully adequate guide in translating. The Scottish historian Alexander Tytler, in his Essay on the Principles of Translation, emphasized that assiduous reading is a more comprehensive guide to a language than are dictionaries. The same point, but also including listening to the spoken language, had earlier, in 1783, been made by the Polish poet and grammarian Onufry Kopczyński.
Other traditions
Due to Western colonialism and cultural dominance in recent centuries, Western translation traditions have largely replaced other traditions. The Western traditions draw on both ancient and medieval traditions, and on more recent European innovations.Though earlier approaches to translation are less commonly used today, they retain importance when dealing with their products, as when historians view ancient or medieval records to piece together events which took place in non-Western or pre-Western environments. Also, though heavily influenced by Western traditions and practiced by translators taught in Western-style educational systems, Chinese and related translation traditions retain some theories and philosophies unique to the Chinese tradition.
Near East
Traditions of translating material among the languages of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Assyria, Anatolia, and Israel go back several millennia. There exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh into Southwest Asian languages of the second millennium BCE.An early example of a bilingual document is the 1274 BCE Treaty of Kadesh between the ancient Egyptian and Hittie empires.
The Babylonians were the first to establish translation as a profession.
The first translations of Greek and Coptic texts into Arabic, possibly indirectly from Syriac translations, seem to have been undertaken as early as the late seventh century CE.
The second Abbasid Caliph funded a translation bureau in Baghdad in the eighth century.
Bayt al-Hikma, the famous library in Baghdad, was generously endowed and the collection included books in many languages, and it became a leading centre for the translation of works from antiquity into Arabic, with its own Translation Department.
Translations into European languages from Arabic versions of lost Greek and Roman texts began in the middle of the eleventh century, when the benefits to be gained from the Arabs’ knowledge of the classical texts were recognised by European scholars, particularly after the establishment of the Escuela de Traductores de Toledo in Spain.
William Caxton’s Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres was a translation into English of an eleventh-century Egyptian text which reached English via translation into Latin and then French.
The translation of foreign works for publishing in Arabic was revived by the establishment of the Madrasat al-Alsun in Egypt in 1813.
Asia
There is a separate tradition of translation in South, Southeast and East Asia, connected especially with the rendering of religious, particularly Buddhist, texts and with the governance of the Chinese empire. Classical Indian translation is characterized by loose adaptation, rather than the closer translation more commonly found in Europe; and Chinese translation theory identifies various criteria and limitations in translation.In the East Asian sphere of Chinese cultural influence, more important than translation per se has been the use and reading of Chinese texts, which also had substantial influence on the Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages, with substantial borrowings of Chinese vocabulary and writing system. Notable is the Japanese kanbun, a system for glossing Chinese texts for Japanese speakers.
Though Indianized states in Southeast Asia often translated Sanskrit material into the local languages, the literate elites and scribes more commonly used Sanskrit as their primary language of culture and government.
Some special aspects of translating from Chinese are illustrated in Perry Link's discussion of translating the work of the Tang dynasty poet Wang Wei.
Most of the difficulties, according to Link, arise in addressing the second problem, "where the impossibility of perfect answers spawns endless debate." Almost always at the center is the letter-versus-spirit dilemma. At the literalist extreme, efforts are made to dissect every conceivable detail about the language of the original Chinese poem. "The dissection, though," writes Link, "normally does to the art of a poem approximately what the scalpel of an anatomy instructor does to the life of a frog."
Chinese characters, in avoiding grammatical specificity, offer advantages to poets that are associated primarily with absences of subject, number, and tense.
It is the norm in classical Chinese poetry, and common even in modern Chinese prose, to omit subjects; the reader or listener infers a subject. The grammars of some Western languages, however, require that a subject be stated. Most of the translators cited in Eliot Weinberger's 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei supply a subject. Weinberger points out, however, that when an "I" as a subject is inserted, a "controlling individual mind of the poet" enters and destroys the effect of the Chinese line. Without a subject, he writes, "the experience becomes both universal and immediate to the reader." Another approach to the subjectlessness is to use the target language's passive voice; but this again particularizes the experience too much.
Nouns have no number in Chinese. "If," writes Link, "you want to talk in Chinese about one rose, you may, but then you use a "measure word" to say "one blossom-of roseness."
Chinese verbs are tense-less: there are several ways to specify when something happened or will happen, but verb tense is not one of them. For poets, this creates the great advantage of ambiguity. According to Link, Weinberger's insight about subjectlessness—that it produces an effect "both universal and immediate"—applies to timelessness as well.
Link proposes a kind of uncertainty principle that may be applicable not only to translation from the Chinese language, but to all translation: