History of Translation: From Ancient Times to Modern Age

Did you know that translation is arguably one of the most significant catalysts in shaping national identities, developing languages, bridging cultural diversities, and understanding how ancient civilizations interacted? The word translation means “bringing/carrying across” – from the Latin word, translatio. Therefore, translation is the practice of bringing a text from a source language to another. Unlike interpretation, which involves oral conversion, translation deals with written text.

Translation has been helping different societies grow and move forward for thousands of years. But do you know about the history of translation? Where it began, where we are, and where it's headed? Or better yet, why is it necessary to learn about the history of translation in the first place? To answer the latter, learning the development and role of translation has allowed scholars and linguistics to discern ancient civilizations by comprehending the contextual meaning of ancient scripts.

Below is a summary of the historical path of translation from ancient times to modern machine translation, freelance translation services, and language service providers. It’s a quite captivating journey, spanning different mediums, cultures, and civilizations.

Translation in Ancient History

According to St. Jerome (patron saint of translation), a good translator should translate a written text “sense for sense” rather than “word for word.” If you don’t already know St. Jerome, he was a historian, theologian, and priest who was most notably known for his translation of the Bible into Latin during the 4^th Century. In fact, his work was the preferred Bible text for the Roman Catholic Church for quite a while. As ancient as the 4^th Century sounds, translation actually dates back to as far as the 2^nd Century when Terence (Roman playwright) translated comedies from Greek to Roman – it was the first concept of a translator.

Concept aside, it is believed that the first translated text on record was the Bible (Hebrew to Greek) during the 3^rd century. At the time of this historical translation, the Jews were not conversant with Hebrew, their inherited language. As a means to make their Holy book mainstream, they translated the Old Testament into the prevailing dominant language, Greek. The translation was known as Septuagint, based on the 70 translators who worked on the project. The Bible was later translated into Latin, Coptic, and Georgian among other languages. Interestingly, the Bible is still being translated today into hundreds of languages all over the world – making it one of the longest-running translation projects in history.

At around 2500 BC, translation services were relatively common in ancient societies in the Middle East. Translators used clay/stone tablets to decrypt ancient Semitic languages such a Sumerian and Eblaite. How do we know about such a prehistoric practice? Believe it or not, we owe such a discovery to Napoleon’s French army. In 1799, the conquering French army found a stone slab (Rosetta Stone) with Hieroglyphic engravings of prehistoric Semitic languages. The finding helped scholars to understand Egyptian hieroglyphics and to gauge the contribution of ancient translators. It should be noted that although various scholars worked on the Rosetta Stone through the ages, Jean-Francois Champollion stands out for his indispensable contribution.

Translation in Medieval History

What do we know about language during the Medieval period? It was a time when Latin was rapidly spreading throughout the Western world. Latin was translated into dialect languages such as ancient English to facilitate seamless interaction. Below are some of the important developments during the Medieval period that left an imprint on the history of translation:

• 9^th Century: The translation of the Ecclesiastical History and The Consolation of Philosophy by Bede and Boethius respectively helped improve the English prose in the Western world.
• 12^th Century: Scholars from Europe meet at the Toledo School of Translators in Spain to translate philosophical, medical, scientific, and religious texts into Latin and Castilian.
• 13^th Century: Roger Bacon gauged that a translator should have systematic information on the source and target language for the best translation outcome.
• 14^th Century: Geoffrey Chaucer (father of English literature) translated Roman De La Rose (French), and works of Boethius (Latin) and Giovanni Boccaccio (Italian) into the lesser popular English language. Additionally, John Wycliffe directed a series of translation of the Bible from Latin to English.
• Into the Renaissance Period: Translations of Greek and Arab into Latin by Arab Translators kept Greek scientific and philosophical work alive.

Translation in Modern History

• The 1950s: Translation work escalated and the manual adaptation of literature became labor-intensive. Engineers researched into ways of automating translation. The efforts bore fruit in 1954 when the Georgetown-IBM experiment helped translate around 60 sentences of Russian text to English in a minute.
• The 1980s: The development and rise of computational power during the period facilitated increased interest in machine translation.
• The 1990s: The machine translation industry thrived due to the introduction of globalization, propagation of the Internet, advanced speech recognition technology, and inexpensive computers.
• 1996 and 1997: Systran and AltaVista Babelfish offered free translation.
• 2012: Google translate was introduced as a game-changer that led to unprecedented growth in the translation industry.

Please note that although machine translations are efficient and cost-effective, they cannot quite replace human translators – machines simply augment the work of human translators.

The Present and Future of Translation

Today, translators have a truckload of tools at their disposal. Translators from different regions of the globe are aided by powerful computers, allowing for more accurate and highly specialized translations. But similar to 19 Centuries ago, translation services still play a significant role in the increasingly interconnected society. It is not surprising that the translation industry was roughly worth $37billion in 2015 – and it has been growing ever since (see figure below).

For the past several thousand years, translators have been playing a crucial role in culture and advancing civilizations. As technology continues to improve and interconnectedness increases, we expect translation to help move our society forward. The industry is expected to continue growing courtesy of the increased demand for non-English translation, the advancement of computer-aided productivity tools, and the growth of globalization.
 

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Rodrigo Ortiz-Monasterio - the author - is a professional Spanish Translator and Spanish Copywriter with over 25 years of experience in the marketing, advertising, business and corporate communications fields.