Translation of
literary works (
novels,
short stories,
plays,
poems, etc.) is considered a literary pursuit in its own right. Notable in
Canadian literature specifically as translators are figures such as
Sheila Fischman,
Robert Dickson, and
Linda Gaboriau; and the Canadian
Governor General's Awards annually present prizes for the best English-to-French and French-to-English literary translations. Other writers, among many who have made a name for themselves as literary translators, include
Vasily Zhukovsky,
Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński,
Vladimir Nabokov,
Jorge Luis Borges,
Robert Stiller,
Lydia Davis,
Haruki Murakami,
Achy Obejas, and
Jhumpa Lahiri. In the 2010s a substantial gender imbalance was noted in literary translation into English, with far more male writers being translated than women writers. In 2014 Meytal Radzinski launched the
Women in Translation campaign to address this.
History The first important translation in the West was that of the
Septuagint, a collection of
Jewish Scriptures translated into early
Koine Greek in
Alexandria between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE. The dispersed Jews had forgotten their ancestral language and needed Greek versions (translations) of their Scriptures. Throughout the
Middle Ages, Latin was the
lingua franca of the western learned world. The 9th-century
Alfred the Great, king of
Wessex in
England, was far ahead of his time in commissioning
vernacular Anglo-Saxon translations of
Bede's
Ecclesiastical History and
Boethius'
Consolation of Philosophy. Meanwhile, the
Christian Church frowned on even partial adaptations of
St. Jerome's
Vulgate of , the standard Latin Bible. In
Asia, the spread of
Buddhism led to large-scale ongoing translation efforts spanning well over a thousand years. The
Tangut Empire was especially efficient in such efforts; exploiting the then newly invented
block printing, and with the full support of the government (contemporary sources describe the Emperor and his mother personally contributing to the translation effort, alongside sages of various nationalities), the Tanguts took mere decades to translate volumes that had taken the
Chinese centuries to render. The
Arabs undertook
large-scale efforts at translation. Having conquered the
Greek world, they made Arabic versions of its philosophical and scientific works. During the Middle Ages, translations of some of these Arabic versions
were made into Latin, chiefly at
Córdoba in
Spain. King
Alfonso X the Wise of
Castile in the 13th century promoted this effort by founding a
Schola Traductorum (School of Translation) in
Toledo. There Arabic texts, Hebrew texts, and Latin texts were translated into the other tongues by Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars, who also argued the merits of their respective religions. Latin translations of Greek and original Arab works of scholarship and science helped advance European
Scholasticism, and thus European science and culture. The broad historic trends in Western translation practice may be illustrated on the example of translation into the English language. The first fine translations into English were made in the 14th century by
Geoffrey Chaucer, who adapted from the
Italian of
Giovanni Boccaccio in his own ''
Knight's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, began a translation of the French-language Roman de la Rose'', and completed a translation of Boethius from the Latin. Chaucer founded an English
poetic tradition on
adaptations and translations from those earlier-established
literary languages. In the second half of the 17th century, the poet John Dryden sought to make
Virgil speak "in words such as he would probably have written if he were living and an Englishman". As great as Dryden's poem is, however, one is reading Dryden, and not experiencing the Roman poet's concision. Similarly,
Homer arguably suffers from
Alexander Pope's endeavor to reduce the Greek poet's "wild paradise" to order. Both works live on as worthy
English epics, more than as a point of access to the Latin or Greek. into contemporary vernacular English; in 2019, off-off-Broadway, the canon was premiered in a month-long series of staged readings.
Anna North writes: "Translating the long-dead language
Homer used — a variant of
ancient Greek called Homeric Greek — into contemporary English is no easy task, and translators bring their own skills, opinions, and stylistic sensibilities to the text. The result is that every translation is different, almost a new poem in itself." An example is
Emily Wilson's 2017 translation of Homer's
Odyssey, where by conscious choice Wilson "lays bare the morals of its time and place, and invites us to consider how different they are from our own, and how similar."
Poetry Views on the possibility of satisfactorily translating poetry show a broad spectrum, depending partly on the degree of latitude desired by the translator in regard to a poem's formal features (rhythm, rhyme, verse form, etc.), but also relating to how much of the suggestiveness and imagery in the host poem can be recaptured or approximated in the target language. In his 1997 book
Le Ton beau de Marot,
Douglas Hofstadter argued that a good translation of a poem must convey as much as possible not only of its literal meaning but also of its form and structure (meter, rhyme or alliteration scheme, etc.). The
Russian-born
linguist and
semiotician Roman Jakobson, however, had in his 1959 paper "
On Linguistic Aspects of Translation", declared that "poetry by definition [is] untranslatable".
Vladimir Nabokov, another Russian-born author, took a view similar to Jakobson's. He considered rhymed, metrical, versed poetry to be in principle untranslatable and therefore rendered his 1964 English translation of
Alexander Pushkin's
Eugene Onegin in prose. Hofstadter, in
Le Ton beau de Marot, criticized Nabokov's attitude toward verse translation. In 1999 Hofstadter published his own translation of
Eugene Onegin, in verse form. However, a number of more contemporary literary translators of poetry lean toward
Alexander von Humboldt's notion of language as a "third universe" existing "midway between the phenomenal reality of the 'empirical world' and the internalized structures of consciousness." Perhaps this is what poet
Sholeh Wolpé, translator of the 12th-century Iranian epic poem
The Conference of the Birds, means when she writes: Twelfth-century Persian and contemporary English are as different as sky and sea. The best I can do as a poet is to reflect one into the other. The sea can reflect the sky with its moving stars, shifting clouds, gestations of the moon, and migrating birds—but ultimately the sea is not the sky. By nature, it is liquid. It ripples. There are waves. If you are a fish living in the sea, you can only understand the sky if its reflection becomes part of the water. Therefore, this translation of
The Conference of the Birds, while faithful to the original text, aims at its re-creation into a still living and breathing work of literature.Poet
Sherod Santos writes: "The task is not to reproduce the content, but with the flint and the steel of one's own language to spark what Robert Lowell has called 'the fire and finish of the original. According to
Walter Benjamin:While a poet's words endure in his own language, even the greatest translation is destined to become part of the growth of its own language and eventually to perish with its renewal. Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own.Gregory Hays, in the course of discussing
Roman adapted translations of
ancient Greek literature, makes approving reference to some views on the translating of poetry expressed by
David Bellos, an accomplished French-to-English translator. Hays writes: The translator's task, when translating
rhymed verse, is more constraining than is the task of the verse's author: the author has full freedom to coordinate his thought with his words; the translator is constrained to adjusting his words to the author's thought.
Book titles Book-title translations can be either descriptive or symbolic. Descriptive book titles, for example
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's
Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince), are meant to be informative, and can name the protagonist, and indicate the theme of the book. An example of a symbolic book title is
Stieg Larsson's
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, whose original Swedish title is
Män som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women). Such symbolic book titles usually indicate the theme, issues, or atmosphere of the work. When translators are working with long book titles, the translated titles are often shorter and indicate the theme of the book.
Plays The translation of plays poses many problems such as the added element of actors, speech duration, translation literalness, and the relationship between the arts of drama and acting. Successful play translators are able to create language that allows the actor and the playwright to work together effectively. Play translators must also take into account several other aspects: the final performance, varying theatrical and acting traditions, characters' speaking styles, modern theatrical discourse, and even the acoustics of the auditorium, i.e., whether certain words will have the same effect on the new audience as they had on the original audience. Audiences in Shakespeare's time were more accustomed than modern playgoers to actors having longer stage time.
Chinese literature In translating Chinese literature, translators struggle to find true fidelity in translating into the target language. In
The Poem Behind the Poem, Barnstone argues that poetry "can't be made to sing through a mathematics that doesn't factor in the creativity of the translator". A notable piece of work translated into English is the
Wen Xuan, an anthology representative of major works of Chinese literature. Translating this work requires a high knowledge of the
genres presented in the book, such as poetic forms, various prose types including memorials, letters, proclamations, praise poems, edicts, and historical, philosophical and political disquisitions, threnodies and laments for the dead, and examination essays. Thus the literary translator must be familiar with the writings, lives, and thought of a large number of its 130 authors, making the
Wen Xuan one of the most difficult literary works to translate.
Religious texts ,
patron saint of translators and
encyclopedists An important role in history has been played by translation of religious texts. Such translations may be influenced by tension between the text and the religious values the translators wish to convey. For example,
Buddhist monks who translated the
Indian
sutras into
Chinese occasionally adjusted their translations to better reflect
China's distinct
culture, emphasizing notions such as
filial piety. One of the first recorded instances of translation in the West was the 3rd century BCE rendering of some books of the biblical
Old Testament from Hebrew into
Koine Greek. The translation is known as the "
Septuagint", a name that refers to the supposedly seventy translators (seventy-two, in some versions) who were commissioned to translate the Bible at
Alexandria, Egypt. According to legend, each translator worked in solitary confinement in his own cell, and all seventy versions proved identical. The
Septuagint became the
source text for later translations into many languages, including Latin,
Coptic,
Armenian, and
Georgian. Still considered one of the greatest translators in history, for having rendered the Bible into Latin, is
Jerome (347–420 CE), the
patron saint of translators. For centuries the
Roman Catholic Church used his translation (known as the
Vulgate), though even this translation stirred controversy. By contrast with Jerome's contemporary,
Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE), who endorsed precise translation, Jerome believed in adaptation, and sometimes invention, in order to more effectively bring across the meaning. Jerome's colorful Vulgate translation of the Bible includes some crucial instances of "overdetermination". For example,
Isaiah's prophecy announcing that the Savior will be born of a virgin, uses the word '
almah, which is also used to describe the dancing girls at
Solomon's court, and simply means young and nubile. Jerome, writes
Marina Warner, translates it as
virgo, "adding divine authority to the virulent cult of
sexual disgust that shaped Christian moral theology (the [Moslem]
Quran, free from this linguistic trap, does not connect
Mariam/
Mary's miraculous nature with moral horror of sex)." The apple that
Eve offered to
Adam, according to Mark Polizzotti, could equally well have been an
apricot, orange, or banana; but Jerome liked the
pun malus/malum (apple/evil). in 1943 showed that among the earliest Christian authors, the understanding and even the text of this devotional verse underwent considerable changes. These ancient writers suggest that, even if the Greek and Latin texts are left unmodified, something like "do not let us fall" could be an acceptable English rendering. Higgins cited
Tertullian, the earliest of the Latin
Church Fathers (, "do not allow us to be led") and
Cyprian (–258 CE, "do not allow us to be led into temptation"). A later author,
Ambrose (–397 CE), followed Cyprian's interpretation. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), familiar with Jerome's Latin Vulgate rendering, observed that "many people... say it this way: 'and do not allow us to be led into temptation.'" In 863 CE the brothers
Saints Cyril and Methodius, the
Byzantine Empire's "Apostles to the Slavs", began translating parts of the Bible into the
Old Church Slavonic language, using the
Glagolitic script that they had devised, based on the
Greek alphabet. The periods preceding and contemporary with the
Protestant Reformation saw translations of the Bible into
vernacular (local) European languages—a development that contributed to
Western Christianity's split into Roman Catholicism and
Protestantism over disparities between Catholic and Protestant renderings of crucial words and passages (and due to a Protestant-perceived need to reform the Roman Catholic Church). Lasting effects on the religions, cultures, and languages of their respective countries were exerted by such Bible translations as
Martin Luther's into German (the
New Testament, 1522),
Jakub Wujek's into Polish (1599, as revised by the
Jesuits), and
William Tyndale's version (New Testament, 1526 and revisions) and the
King James Version into English (1611). 's
horned Moses Efforts to translate the Bible into English had their
martyrs.
William Tyndale (–1536) was convicted of
heresy at
Antwerp, was strangled to death while tied at the stake, and then his dead body was burned. Earlier,
John Wycliffe ( – 1384) had managed to die a natural death, but 30 years later the
Council of Constance in 1415 declared him a heretic and decreed that his works and earthly remains should be burned; the order, confirmed by
Pope Martin V, was carried out in 1428, and Wycliffe's corpse was exhumed and burned and the ashes cast into the
River Swift. Debate and religious
schism over different translations of religious texts continue, as demonstrated by, for example, the
King James Only movement. A famous
mistranslation of a
Biblical text is the rendering of the Hebrew word (
keren), which has several meanings, as "
horn" in a context where it more plausibly means "beam of light": as a result, for centuries artists, including sculptor
Michelangelo, have rendered
Moses the Lawgiver with horns growing from his forehead. translation, verses 33–34 of
Quran's
surah (chapter) 36 Such fallibility of the translation process has contributed to the
Islamic world's ambivalence about translating the
Quran (also spelled
Koran) from the original Arabic, as received by the prophet
Muhammad from
Allah (God) through the angel
Gabriel incrementally between 609 and 632 CE, the year of Muhammad's death. During prayers, the
Quran, as the miraculous and inimitable word of Allah, is recited only in Arabic. However, as of 1936, it had been translated into at least 102 languages. A fundamental difficulty in translating the
Quran accurately stems from the fact that an Arabic word, like a Hebrew or Aramaic word, may have a
range of meanings, depending on
context. This is said to be a linguistic feature, particularly of all
Semitic languages, that adds to the usual similar difficulties encountered in translating between any two languages. To complicate matters further, as with other languages, the meanings and usages of some expressions have changed
over time, between the Classical Arabic of the
Quran, and modern Arabic. Thus a modern Arabic speaker may misinterpret the meaning of a word or passage in the
Quran. Moreover, the interpretation of a Quranic passage will also depend on the historic context of Muhammad's life and of his early community. Properly researching that context requires a detailed knowledge of
hadith and
sirah, which are themselves vast and complex texts. Hence, analogously to the translating of
Chinese literature, an attempt at an accurate translation of the
Quran requires a knowledge not only of the Arabic language and of the target language, including their respective evolutions, but also a deep understanding of the two
cultures involved.
Experimental literature Experimental literature, such as
Kathy Acker’s novel
Don Quixote (1986) and
Giannina Braschi’s novel
Yo-Yo Boing! (1998), features a translative writing that highlights discomforts of the interlingual and translingual encounters and literary translation as a creative practice. These authors weave their own translations into their texts. Acker's
Postmodern fiction both fragments and preserves the materiality of
Catullus’s Latin text in ways that tease out its semantics and syntax without wholly appropriating them, a method that unsettles the notion of any fixed and finished translation. Her trilogy presents the evolution of the Spanish language through loose translations of dramatic, poetic, and philosophical writings from the Medieval,
Golden Age, and
Modernist eras into contemporary Caribbean, Latin American, and Nuyorican Spanish expressions. Braschi's translations of classical texts in Iberian Spanish (into other regional and historical linguistic and poetic frameworks) challenge the concept of national languages.
Science fiction Science fiction being a
genre with a recognizable set of conventions and literary genealogies, in which language often includes
neologisms, neosemes, and
invented languages, techno-scientific and
pseudoscientific vocabulary, and fictional representation of the translation process, the translation of science-fiction texts involves specific concerns. The science-fiction translator tends to acquire specific competences and assume a distinctive publishing and cultural agency. As in the case of other mass-fiction genres, this professional specialization and role often is not recognized by publishers and scholars. Translation of science fiction accounts for the transnational nature of science fiction's repertoire of shared conventions and
tropes. After
World War II, many European countries were swept by a wave of translations from the English. Due to the prominence of English as a source language, the use of
pseudonyms and
pseudotranslations became common in countries such as Italy and English has often been used as a
vehicular language to translate from languages such as Chinese and Japanese. More recently, the international market in science-fiction translations has seen an increasing presence of source languages other than English. ==Technical translation==