HISTORY OF LITERARY TRANSLATION

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Literature has always been indebted to translation throughout history; most of the classics have had to be translated from their original language into major European languages. A brief history of the evolution of the translation studies and its theories helps to widen the scope of linguistic studies and exert tremendous influences.

The Romans translated the well-known Greek classics, with Cicero and Horace as the first theorists. The Romans permitted the use of new words in translations, because they too aimed at enriching their own literary tradition. They did made a significant distinction between ‘word for word’ translation and ‘sense for sense’ translation.

The Bible was translated into vernacular languages in Europe in the sixteenth century. The translators of Bible aimed at both intelligibility and a gratifying style.

The renaissance style was that of creative appropriation. Wyatt’s translations of Petrarch’s sonnets have an immediate impact on the readers with a very contemporary feel.

Rationalism and inductive reasoning dominated the seventeenth century, and Dryden, Pope, and Company favored translation with some latitude, a kind of paraphrasing, a sense-for-sense translation.

The Romantics gave the art of translation a twist. They rejected the rationalism of the preceding centuries, and emphasized the crucial role of imagination. So translation was viewed as a higher creative activity. The romantics favored the use of created language, which gave the source language text an element of strangeness.

The Victorians also favored the remoteness of time and place of the original text. Infact, Mathew Arnold went as far to suggest that the scholars are the true judges of a translation (the Victorian superiority complex at work here). While the Victorians were closer to the neo-classical perspective, they did not see translations as a means to enrich their culture (‘colonial superiority’, ‘White Man’s Burden).

The twentieth century translation theory was predominated by the discipline of linguistics, and later theories like structuralism, deconstruction, post colonialism, culture studies and feminism, et all.

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