Translation Vagaries Throughout History

By Tim Frank


The art and science of translating written text or the spoken word into another language that is understandable has many vagaries. This is not a precise science because it is nearly impossible to translate verbatim a word for word transcript.

Vagaries in languages and localized text or word usage make it nearly impossible to translate one exact word for another. Translation requires that the person who is translating the text have some knowledge of the culture as well as the language into which the text will be translated to prevent embarrassing or costly mistakes.

There is a long and very rich history behind translation. In history we believe that the first viable translation that occurred was in 2000 BC in Sumeria where the Epic of Gilgamesh was translated into Southwest Asian languages.

The Rosetta Stone is a most famous historical translation that appeared around 196 BC and was commissioned by Ptolemy V of Egypt. It was inscribed in three different languages and is thought of as a definitive example of the science of translation. Now, it is considered the key to understanding translation.

It is not all that easy to translate from one language to another. With Rosetta Stone, after it surfaced in 1799 and then reappeared again, it took more than twenty years to fully translate the texts that appeared on the stone.

In some cases the history of translation has been rocky. It has always been difficult to change the wording of a given text and to keep the meaning intact.

There has been a lot of discussion in the form of the written word from ancient Greece, where early translation was first practiced concerning the process and methods for accomplishing it. It was in this place that literal translation, or the art of meta-phrase and paraphrase were distinguished and the entire process laid out to make certain that the critical part of translating anything into another language involved cultural truths.

Translation became much more of a science during the 1700s when writer and translator John Dryden described the process of translation as being two different modes of phrasing. He agonized over many of his translations, speaking about them in this fashion: " When words appear . . . literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed. But since... what is beautiful in one language is often barbarous, nay sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author's words." Modern day translation takes a great deal of instruction in word substitution from Dryden's methodology.

It was during the 18 century that translation advanced in such a way that it became less than accurate. Translators of this time took liberties in omitting sections they deemed boring or would add no value to the audience. This led to some unique and often strange translations.

Commerce brought about more changes to the need for translation as we entered the 19th century because of changes to transportation means. This necessitated better global translation than had been seen previously. This brought about new levels of accuracy so as to accommodate the needs of cultures, languages and business.

As we have moved into the 21st century and the age of computers, there is now even more importance applied to accurate translation. The world is now more like one country separated only by different languages and cultures. We have become a global community where people from different language groups come together on a daily basis. Individuals interact online and countries, governments and business buy goods and services from each other.

To allow for that machine translation arrived and in some cases, companies relied on inexpensive machine translation and found that it was not in their best interest. Using mechanical translation alone can provide for some hilarious results. Who doesn't remember the "All your base are belong to us." fiasco when the game Zerowing was translated poorly from the original Japanese game in the early nineties?

No one is saying that translation through software doesn't have a place because it does help for online users and document translation.

Websites and brochures are created and must be translated, giving rise to the need for a rapid, or in some cases, a nearly instant translation. Software can be a means for the translation of sites to provide for that instant -if not perfect-understanding.

These days, most of the medical, business and legal translation is performed by software that is given assistance from human translators. Combined together, this allows any problems with translation to be caught quickly. Translation from one language to another is understandable and accurate because they are double checked by humans in order to ensure that local expressions and certain words being used convey the message appropriately.

With the evolution of translation technology, the changes have been dramatic and they allow for more accuracy at a greatly reduced cost. This has done much to increase the understanding between people of the world.




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