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A secular icon for the art of translation is the Rosetta Stone, a rock stele inscribed with a decree issued in 196 BCE in Memphis, Egypt, on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The same decree is inscribed in three scripts: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in the upper text, Demotic script in the middle text, and Ancient Greek script in the lowest text. The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 during the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt. It has been on public display at the British Museum in London almost continuously since 1802, and has become the most visited object in the museum. The upper text of the Rosetta Stone also provided the key to the understanding of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

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Translation during the Renaissance period played an integral role in the remodelling, transformation, and interconnected relations that shaped European culture. Renaissance artists started expressing themselves in different ways and exploring new scholarly pursuits. The new outlook from the artists of the Renaissance period was only possible due to the culmination of translations throughout the Middle Ages, paving the way for reformation.

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One of the most famous translations in the history of translation services occurred around 1259 B.C. and was called the Treaty of Kadesh.  It was signed by the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II and the Hittite King Hattusili III.  Unfortunately, the treaty didn’t lead to peace between the two nations right away but it is still significant to us today because it’s the oldest surviving peace treaty in the world. Two versions of the treaty have been found, one in Egypt and one in present-day Turkey, where the capital of the Hittite empire was located. In Egypt, the treaty was preserved through engravings on the wall of Pharoah Ramesses II’s mortuary temple in Thebes. In the Hittite empire, it was engraved on baked clay tablets. a bilingual Egyptian-Hittite treatise that is the only ancient Near Eastern treatise in which the versions of both sides have survived.

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This version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, translated by William Muss-Arnolt in 1an epic poem from Ancient Mesopotamia often regarded as the earliest surviving great work of literature translated by contemporaries into Southwest Asian languages, because of a longstanding tradition of translating material among Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Syriac, Anatolian and Hebrew.

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Sense for sense translation (2nd century BCE.)

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Sense for sense translation (2nd century BCE.)

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The debate relating to sense-for-sense translation vs. word-for-word translation also started around that time. The coiner of the term “sense for sense” is said to be Jerome in his “Letter to Pammachius”. While translating the Bible into Latin (later known as the “Vulgate”), Jerome stated that the translator needed to translate “not word for word but sense for sense” (“non verbum e verbo sed sensum de sensu”).

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It is regarded as the first major translation in the Western world. The dispersed Jews had forgotten Hebrew, their ancestral language, and needed the Bible to be translated into Greek to be able to read it. This translation is known as the “Septuagint”, a name that refers to the seventy translators who were commissioned to translate the Hebrew Bible in Alexandria, Egypt. Each translator worked in solitary confinement in his own cell, and according to legend all seventy versions proved identical. The “Septuagint” became the source text for later translations into Latin, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian and other languages. Related biblical texts in Hebrew were also translated into Greek in Alexandria during the two following centuries.

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Translations of Latin works (9th century)

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Translations of Latin works (9th century)

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Latin was the lingua franca of the Western learned world throughout the Middle Ages, with few translations of Latin works into vernacular languages. Alfred the Great, King of Wessex in England, was far ahead of his time in commissioning vernacular translations from Latin into English of Bede’s “Ecclesiastical History” and Boethius’s “The Consolation of Philosophy”, which contributed to improve the underdeveloped English prose of that time.

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Toledo School of Translators (12th and 13th centuries)

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Toledo School of Translators (12th and 13th centuries)

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Toledo School of Translators (Escuela de Traductores de Toledo) became a meeting point for European scholars who attracted by the high wages they were offered came and settled down in Toledo, Spain, to translate major philosophical, religious, scientific and medical works from Arabic, Greek and Hebrew into Latin and Castilian. Toledo was a city of libraries offering a number of manuscripts, and one of the few places in medieval Europe where a Christian could be exposed to Arabic language and culture.

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English scholar heralded for his early exposition of a “universal grammar” (the concept that the ability to learn grammar is hard-wired into the brain). He was the first linguist to assess that a translator should know well both the source language and the target language to produce a good translation, and that the translator should also be well versed in the discipline of the work he was translating. According to legend, after finding out that few translators did, Roger Bacon decided to do away with translation and translators altogether. But his decision did not last long. He relied on many Toledo translations from Arabic into Latin to make major contributions in the fields of optics, astronomy, natural sciences, chemistry and mathematics.

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The first fine translations into English were produced by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century. Chaucer translated the “Roman de la Rose” from French, and Boethius’s works from Latin. He also adapted some works of the Italian humanist Giovanni Boccaccio to produce his own “Knight’s Tale” and “Troilus and Criseyde” (c.1385) in English. Chaucer is regarded as the founder of an English poetic tradition based on translations and adaptations of literary works in languages that were more “established” than English at the time, beginning with Latin and Italian. The finest religious translation of that time was the “Wycliffe’s Bible” (1382-84), named after John Wycliffe, an English theologian who translated the Bible from Latin to English.

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English prose translation (15th century)

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English prose translation (15th century)

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The great age of English prose translation began in the late 15th century with Thomas Malory’s “Le Morte d’Arthur” (1485), a free translation/adaptation of Arthurian romances about the legendary King Arthur, as well as Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table. Thomas Malory “interpreted” existing French and English stories about these figures while adding original material, e.g. the “Gareth” story about one of the Knights of the Round Table.

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Birth of the Renaissance Period (12th and 15th centuries)

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Birth of the Renaissance Period (12th and 15th centuries)

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The Renaissance period came right after the Middle Ages, resulting from certain events in the 12th and 15th centuries. Examples of such events include the declining influence of the Catholic Church and the end of the feudal system. These were prevalent social changes during the historical period. Another major event, however, was the development of various national languages. Renaissance artists reflected the societal shift and study of new ideas, with artists of the Renaissance gradually shifting from abstract medieval paintings to realistic images depicting the beauty of the natural world.

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The Invention of the Moving Printing Press (1450)

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The Invention of the Moving Printing Press (1450)

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Most historians state that the Renaissance period kicked off when Johannes Gutenberg created the moving printing press in 1450. The innovation automated the production of books. This increased the volume of texts available to users, as well as increasing their availability. This availability ultimately led to the rapid growth of readers all over Western Europe.

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The Increase in Translation Studies (1400s)

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The Increase in Translation Studies (1400s)

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The increased demand for books became a turning point of the Renaissance period. Simultaneously, the strengthening of European nation-states raised the status of provincial languages. In turn, this diminished the role that Latin played in society, increasing the demand for translations into European languages. There was thus a sudden need for more translation scholars to adapt texts. The translation movement primarily took hold in England, Germany and France in the early 1400s. The translation scholars in these countries were deemed artists of the Renaissance period. Contrary to the translation tradition in the Middle Ages, these Renaissance artists adapted text “sense for sense” rather than “word for word” to retain meaning.

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Infamous Renaissance Scholars of Translation (mid-15th century)

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Infamous Renaissance Scholars of Translation (mid-15th century)

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Translation scholars formed The Platonic Academy during the mid-15th century in Florence to further develop the translation movement. The building of the Platonic Academy in Florence was a turning point for the artists of the Renaissance. The society started to translate notable philosophical and religious works that inspired many Renaissance artists and literary scholars. Marsilio Ficino was one of the Academy’s first scholars of the Renaissance period. Ficino was able to translate the entire works of Plato into Latin successfully. This included the Enneads of Plotinus and many other Neoplatonic works. Thomas Mallory was another notable member of the Platonic Academy, his major accomplishment being the translation of the tales of King Arthur.

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In the 1960s, some scholars began to scrutinise the word-for-word and sense-for-sense concepts. The primary focus of the equivalence-based approach was on correspondence between the ST and the TT in terms of form (style) and content (meaning). The most controversial issue during the period of this approach was around meaning and equivalence. One of the prominent scholars concerning this debate was Jakobson , who was famous for his contention that no complete equivalence can be established between words (code-units). Equivalence between the ST and TT should rather focus on the message than the individual words .

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The most notable proponent of this approach was Vermeer, who was most popular for developing the ‘skopos theory’. The term ‘skopos’ originates from Greek, and it means ‘purpose’, ‘function’ or ‘aim’. Proponents of the skopos theory contend that the function of the target text determines the translation strategy to be employed by the translator. This is the reason why skopos theory is also called the functional approach. Proponents of this approach further argue that translation is a form of action and every action has a purpose attached to it.

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The polysystem theory was founded by Even-Zohar, and his theory was built from the work of Russian formalists and Czech structuralists of the 1930s and 1940s. Even-Zohar raises some criticisms against the functional approach, which, therefore, indicates that his model might have dawned slightly before the functional approach. For example, he maintains that ‘functionalism has profoundly altered both structures and methods, questions and answers, of every discipline into which it was introduced’.

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The descriptive translation studies( 1980s )

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The descriptive translation studies( 1980s )

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emerged in the 1980s as a new paradigm in translation theory. It was developed by Gideon Toury, who built from his earlier work in the 1970s, as well as the polysystem theory. he approach is of a descriptive nature as it ought to describe how translations are supposed to be done. Clearly, this signals another shift in translation theory, from the prescriptive models that existed before the 1970s which provided a ‘prescription’ as to how the translation task should be executed.

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Bassnett and Lefevere were instrumental in the introduction of the approach into translation studies, through their essays ‘Translation, History and Culture,’ which came out in 1990 . The cultural turn began to consider the aspects of culture, politics and ideology as influencing factors in the translation process. It is concerned with how culture, history, context and convention exert an influence on the translation process.

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Publication of Luther’s Translation of the New Testament (1522)

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Publication of Luther’s Translation of the New Testament (1522)

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Martin Luther's translation of the New Testament into German, published in 1522, was a watershed moment. This translation allowed the Bible to be read and understood by the common people, rather than just the clergy who knew Latin. It was a key factor in the dissemination of reformist ideas and enabled individuals to interpret the Bible directly, challenging the Catholic Church's authority

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Following Luther's example, other reformers such as William Tyndale translated the Bible into English. Tyndale's New Testament, published in 1526, was the first English translation from the original Greek text. These vernacular translations were instrumental in spreading the Reformation across Europe, as they made the Bible accessible to a broader audience and helped to undermine the Church's control over scriptural interpretation

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Reform The translation of the Bible into vernacular languages contributed significantly to the increase in literacy rates, as people sought to read the Bible for themselves. This democratization of Scripture was a powerful tool for the Reformation, allowing reformers to base their criticisms of the Catholic Church on biblical grounds and fostering a more personal and direct relationship between believers and God. The widespread availability of the Bible in local languages also facilitated the emergence of various Protestant denominations and the diversification of Christian thought

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During the Romantic period, translation was characterized by a significant degree of freedom, particularly in poetical translations. This approach, unlike the rigorous classical aesthetic of the 18th century, allowed translators to capture the spirit and ideas of the original work rather than adhering strictly to literal translation. This freedom was exemplified in translations of German literature into English, such as Schiller's The Robbers (1792), which introduced Romantic ambiguity and extravagance into English literature

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German literature played a crucial role in shaping the Romantic movement in other European countries, particularly through translations. Works by German authors like Goethe, Schiller, and the early Romantics such as Novalis and Friedrich Hölderlin were widely translated and influenced writers across Europe. These translations helped spread Romantic ideals, including the emphasis on nature, the supernatural, and national identity

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The Romantic period saw significant theoretical debates on the nature of translation. Translators and critics discussed the balance between conveying the original author's ideas and style versus the need for the translation to read naturally in the target language. Figures like John Dryden and Alexander Tytler proposed guidelines for translation, emphasizing the importance of capturing the "spirit of the author" and the "beauty of his words" rather than mere literal accuracy

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Overview of Translation in the Romantic Period

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Overview of Translation in the Romantic Period

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During the Romantic period, translation was a vital tool for the dissemination of literary ideas and the expansion of cultural horizons. The movement away from the strict literal translations of the classical era allowed for more creative and interpretive translations that captured the essence and spirit of the original works. This freedom in translation facilitated the spread of German Romantic literature across Europe, influencing writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron. Theoretical debates on translation also flourished, with a focus on balancing fidelity to the original with the need for natural expression in the target language. These translations not only introduced new themes and styles but also contributed to the development of national literatures and the broader Romantic movement

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Contemporary Approaches to Translation Theory and Practice

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Contemporary Approaches to Translation Theory and Practice

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Modern translation theory emphasizes a multifaceted approach, combining linguistic, cultural, and contextual considerations. This is evident in the concept of "communicative translation," which prioritizes the target culture and ensures that the translation aligns with the cultural context of the audience, sometimes at the cost of slight deviations from the exact original meaning

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The present day has seen significant advancements in machine translation technologies, which have transformed the translation process. While these tools are not yet perfect, they facilitate faster and more efficient translation, especially for large volumes of text. However, human translators are still essential for ensuring accuracy, particularly in contexts requiring nuanced cultural and linguistic understanding

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Contemporary translation practices often incorporate interdisciplinary approaches, such as those seen in performance translation. This involves considering dramaturgical logic, staging, actor training, and performance aesthetics to ensure that translations are not just linguistic but also culturally and contextually relevant. This approach is particularly important in the translation of theatrical works and other performance arts

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Overview of Translation in the Present Day

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Overview of Translation in the Present Day

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In the present day, translation is a complex and multifaceted field that integrates various disciplines and technologies. The rise of communicative translation highlights the importance of cultural alignment and contextuality, ensuring that translations are meaningful and effective in their target audience. Technological advancements, including machine translation, have streamlined the process but also underscore the need for human expertise to handle complex and culturally sensitive translations. Additionally, interdisciplinary approaches, such as those in performance translation, emphasize the importance of considering the entire production context to achieve translations that are both faithful to the original and relevant to the new audience. These developments reflect the evolving nature of translation, which now encompasses not just linguistic accuracy but also cultural sensitivity, technological efficiency, and artistic interpretation.