My Translation and Editing Text Reviewer

Translation: Communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text.
- from Latin “translation” meaning to carry across or to bring across
- Alternative Latin “traduco” which means to lead across
- Ancient Greek “metaphrasis” which means a speaking across

Metaphrase: literal or word-for-word translation (formal equivalence)
Paraphrase: Saying in other words (dynamic equivalence)

History of Translation:

-Septuagint: a collection of Jewish Scriptures translated into Koine Greek
-Lingua Franca: Latin (Middle Ages)
-Alfred the Great: commissioned vernacular Anglo-Saxon translations of Bede’s Ecclasiastical History and Borthius’ Consolation of Philosophy
-The Christian Church frowned on even partial adaptations of St. Jerome’s Vulgate, The Standard Latin Bible

Asia:
-Spread of Buddhism led to large-scale translation efforts
-Tangut Empire-exploited block printing

Arabs: undertook large-scale efforts at translation
-Made Arabic versions of the Greeks’ philosophical and scientific works
-Some Arabic translations of these works were made into Latin (Middle Ages)
-Development of European Scholasticism

Western:
-14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer adapted from the Italian of Giovanni Boccaccio his own Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, French Roman dela Rose and completed Borthius from Latin; founded an English poetic tradition on adaptations and translations from earlier established literary languages
-First great English Translation: Wycliffe Bible: showed weaknesses of underdeveloped English prose
-Great Age of English Prose Translation: Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur – a free adaptation of Arthurian Romances
-First great Tudor translations: Tyndale New Testament, its Authorized Version and Lord Berners’ version of Jean Froissart’s Chronicles

Renaissance Italy
-Cosimo de’ Medici of Georgius Gemistus Pletho (Florence)
-Latin translation of Plato’s works by Marsilio Ficino
-Erasmus’ Latin edition of the New Testament
-Readers demanded rigor of rendering
-Non-scholarly Literature continued to rely on adaptation.
-France’s Pleiade, England’s Tudor poets and Elizabethan translators adapted themes by Horace, Ovid, Petrarch and modern Latin Writers
-Rise of Middle Class
-Development of Printing

Elizabethan Period of Translation:
-stylistic equivalence
-no concern for verbal accuracy

Second Half of 17th Century:
-John Dryden sought to make Virgil speak in words such as he would have written if he were living and an Englishman
-Homer suffered from Alexander Pope’s endeavor to reduce the Greek Poet’s “Wild Paradise” to order

18th Century:
-the watchword of translators was ease of reading; whatever they did not understand in a text, or thought might bore readers, they omitted
-James Macpherson’s translations of Ossian

19th Century:
-The policy became the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text except for bawdy passages and the addition of copious explanatory footnotes
-Style: far-reaching metaphrase to constantly remind readers that they were reading a foreign classic
-Exception: Outstanding translation of Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyan

20th Century:
-A new pattern was set in 1871 by Benjamin Jowett who translated Plato into simple yet straightforward language.





Types of Translation:
1. Legal – field of law
2. Literal – word-for-word
3. Technical – specific profession
4. Interpreting
a. Simultaneous
b. Consecutive
c. Whispered
d. Gestural
e. Conference
f. Escort
g. Community
h. Legal
i. Medical
5. Machine
a. Rule-based
i. Transfer-based
ii. Interlingual
iii. Dictionary-based
b. Statistical
c. Example-based
d. Hybrid

Direct Translation:
1. Borrowing: no translation
2. Calque: word-for-word (phrase)
3. Literal: word-for-word

Oblique Translation Techniques:
1. Transposition: change sequence
2. Modulations: different phrase
3. Equivalency: different way
4. Adaptation: different, familiar way
5. Compensation: lost meaning is expressed somewhere else in the text
6. Transliteration: Converting to phonetic equivalent

Disambiguation: finding a suitable translation when a word can have more than one meaning (first raised by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel

Qualities of a Competent Translator:
1. good knowledge of source language (spoken and written)
2. excellent command of target language
3. familiar with the subject matter
4. profound understanding of etymological and idiomatic correlates between two languages
5. finely tuned sense of when to metaphrase and paraphrase

Malapropism: the substitution of a word for a word with a similar sound, in which the resulting phrase makes no sense but often creates a comic effect.