The History of Translation studies

1. Ideally it combines the history of translation theory with the study of literary and social trends in which translation has actually played a direct part. It is the story of interchange in between languages and between cultures and as such has ramifications for the research study of both language and culture. 2. Carefully allied to literary history, translation history can describe changes in literary patterns, account for the regrowth of a culture, trace changes in politics or ideology and describe the growth and transfer of thought and understanding in a specific period.

3. It goes without stating that each culture will have its own particular translation history according to the historic and political events that have shaped it.

There are of course durations in history including translation that prevail to lots of cultures.

The growth of the Roman empire, for instance, the invention of printing or the Reformation all had effect on most locations of Europe and its translation activities. Other continents will have experienced other intrusions, other advances in technologies, other religious beliefs.

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Occasions like these are constantly assets of departure for research, however their effect on an individual culture differs according to the local context.

4. Putting translated texts into their historical contexts assists specify and represent the policies utilized by past translators and so provides a minimum of a point of departure for developing strategies. Through history we encounter examples of the darker possibilities of translation, of the opportunities for distortion or control of text, of the translations undertaken with hostile intent.

Looking at the history of translation theory gives bases for comparison and shows whether translators are making progress or merely repeating the very same mistakes.

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It also helps to assess whether modern-day theorists are saying something brand-new or merely repeating the exact same ideas in different language. 5. The study of beginnings or postscripts of a past age might reveal the translators' mindsets towards both translation and the translated text. The preface to the Rheims translation of the Bible, to take one example, exposes that some translations are carried out with the utmost unwillingness (Pollard,301).

Alexander Ross's preface to his translation of the Qur'an from the French version informs the reader that there is such a thing as hostile translation, a translation performed for the purpose of challenging the text rather than promoting it 6. Case studies viewed historically can reveal so much about strategies and conventions. It is possible to trace the progress of the Phaedra story, for example, from Euripides' Hippolytus, via Seneca's Latin Phaedra, Racine's Phedre to Edmund Smith's English translation of Racine, to continue through J. C. Knight, John Cairncross and Robert Lowell's versions of the same and to conclude by

looking at Ted Hughes' translation, the modern version of Paul Schmidt and the controversial play by Sarah Kane. The history of Phaedra in translation teaches how translation conforms (or not) to the dramatic and cultural conventions of the target language. It addresses adaptation as a form of translation, shows how subtlety in choice of words can change a character, gives strategies for coping with verse forms that do not exist in the target language, and also illustrates the differ- ence between translating for performance and producing a text in the target language.

7. Negotiating translation history is rather like navigating with various specialist maps. Individually they give different features of the cultural, linguistic, political, historical, religious, technological, literary landscape, but there is too much information to make a single map of them. Consequently, it is necessary to separate out some relevant aspects of each in order to draw a specialist translation history map. Interdisciplinary research is essential, since most sources are interrelated and may be approached from several directions.

Language issues This area includes the history of language, the rise of the vernacular(родной язык), education and translation as a tool for learning a foreign language. Literary issues This area includes literary history, history of translation theory and the work of individual translators. Religious and philosophical issues This area deals with the translation that arose from the spread of philosophical and religious systems from one culture to another.

Evangelisation, exegesis (толкование текста) or curiosity required the translation of Buddhist texts first from Sanskrit into Chinese and later into Japanese and English, produced a Latin version of the Qur'an from Arabic and, later, European vernacular versions, and necessitated the Bible's translation from various Greek and Latin texts into one Latin version and eventually into European vernaculars.

Scientific interchange This area includes translation activity concerned with the acquisition and expansion of knowledge. It can occur on quite a small scale in fairly local projects (the collecting of recipes and remedies(лекарства) for example), or it may encompass larger areas of medicine, astronomy, mathematics or natural sciences.

Updated: Jul 07, 2022
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The History of Translation studies. (2016, Sep 18). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/the-history-of-translation-studies-essay

The History of Translation studies essay
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