Translator

Discussions of the theory and practice of translation reach back into  antiquity  and show remarkable continuities. The  ancient Greeks  distinguished between  metaphrase  ( literal translation ) and  paraphrase . This distinction was adopted by English  poet  and  translator   John Dryden  (1631–1700), 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: 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: 'tis enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate the sense. Cicero Dryden cautioned, how...

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 c. 384 CE, the standard  Latin   Bible . In  Asia , the spread of  Buddhism  led...

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 ...

Technical translation  renders documents such as manuals, instruction sheets, internal memos, minutes, financial reports, and other documents for a limited audience (who are directly affected by the document) and whose useful life is often limited. Thus, a user guide for a particular model of refrigerator is useful only for the owner of the refrigerator, and will remain useful only as long as that refrigerator model is in use. Similarly, software documentation generally pertains to a particular software, whose applications are used only by a certain class of users.

Fidelity  (or "faithfulness") and felicity (or  transparency ), dual ideals in translation, are often (though not always) at odds. A 17th-century French critic coined the phrase " les belles infidèles " to suggest that translations can be either faithful or beautiful, but not both. [b]   Fidelity  is the extent to which a translation accurately renders the meaning of the  source text , without distortion.  Transparency  is the extent to which a translation appears to a native speaker of the target language to have originally been written in that language, and conforms to its grammar, syntax and idiom.  John Dryden  (1631–1700) wrote in his preface to the translation anthology  Sylvae : Where I have taken away some of [the original authors'] Expressions, and cut them shorter, it may possibly be on this consideration, that what was beautiful in the Greek or Latin, would not appear so shining in the English; and where I have enlar...

The  English  word "translation" derives from the  Latin  word  translatio , which comes from  trans , "across" +  ferre , "to carry" or "to bring" ( -latio  in turn coming from  latus , the  past participle  of  ferre ). Thus  translatio  is "a carrying across" or "a bringing across": in this case, of a text from one language to another. The  Germanic languages  and some  Slavic languages  have  calqued  their words for the  concept  of "translation" on  translatio . The  Romance languages  and the remaining  Slavic  languages have derived their words for the concept of "translation" from an alternative Latin word,  traductio , itself derived from  traducere  ("to lead across" or "to bring across", from  trans , "across" +  ducere , "to lead" or "to bring"). The  Ancient Greek  term for "translation",...