1.3 AN EARLY HISTORY OF THE

DISCIPLINE

ANGELICA VIVEROS CRUZ

Writings on the subject of translating go far back

in recorded history.

The practice of translation was crucial for the early dissemination of key cultural and religious texts and concepts.

the different ways of translating were discussed by, among others, Cicero and Horace (first century BCE) and St Jerome (fourth century CE), their writings were to exert an important influence up until the twentieth century.

• His approach to translating the Greek Septuagint Bible into Latin would affect later translations of the Scriptures.

• In western Europe the translation of the Bible was to be the battleground of conflicting ideologies for well over a thou-sand years and especially during the Reformation in the sixteenth century.

• In China, it was the translation of the Buddhist sutras that inaugurated a long discus-sion on translation practice from the first century CE .

St Jerome’s

St. Jerome’s suggestions about how to render translation can be considered another example of Source-oriented theories:

St. Jerome already stated that Bible translations must respect the exact form of the source text because God’s word must not be tampered with whereas in secular texts the translator should strive to render the meaning of the source text.

In the last 34 years of his life, Jerome wrote the bulk

of his work. In addition to tracts on monastic life and defenses of (and attacks on) theological practices, he wrote some history, a few biographies, and many biblical exegeses.

Jerome also translated books of the Old Testament into Latin. While the amount of work he did was considerable, Jerome didn't manage to make a complete translation of the Bible into Latin; however, his work formed the core of what would become, eventually, the accepted Latin translation known as The Vulgate

ST. JEROME AND THE BIBLE

The version of the Bible used by the Roman

Catholic church for over a millennia and a half, the Vulgate is a Latin translation of the original bible texts, created mainly by St. Jerome during the end of the third and start of the fourth centuries CE. Vulgate derives from the phrase versio vulgata, or common translation.

THE VULGATE

the study of the field developed into an academic discipline only in the latter part of the twentieth century. Before that, translation had often been relegated to an element of language learning.

In fact, from the late eighteenth century to the 1960s and beyond, language learning in secondary schools in many countries had come to be dominated by what was known as grammar-translation.

This is an approach that persists even today in certain contexts. Typical of this is the following rather bizarre and decontextualized collection of sentences to translate into Spanish, for the prac-tice of Spanish tense use.

GRAMMAR TRANSLATION

Grammar-translation therefore fell into increasing

disrepute, particularly in many English-language countries, with the rise of alternative forms of language teaching such as the direct method and the communicative approach from the 1960s and 1970s.

The communicative approach stressed students’ natural capacity to learn language and attempts to replicate ‘authentic’ language-learning conditions in the classroom. It often privileged spoken over written forms, at least initially, and generally avoided use of the students’ mother tongue.

DIRECT METHOD AND THE

COMMUNCATIVE APPROACH

In 1960s USA, starting in Iowa and Princeton,

literary translation was promoted by the translation workshop concept.

The translation workshops were intended as a platform for the introduction of new translations into the target culture and for the discussion of the finer principles of the translation process and of understanding a text.

TRANSLATION WORKSHOP

literature is studied and compared

transnationally and transculturally, necessitating the reading of some works in translation.

Students and instructors in the field, usually called "comparatists," have traditionally been proficient in several languages and acquainted with the literary traditions, literary criticism, and major literary texts of those languages.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Contrastive linguistics is a practice-oriented

linguistic approach that seeks to describe the differences and similarities between a pair of languages (hence it is occasionally called "differential linguistics").

Contrastive descriptions can occur at every level of linguistic structure: speech sounds (phonology), written symbols (graphology), word-formation (morphology), word meaning (lexicology), collocation (phraseology), sentence structure (syntax) and complete discourse (textology).

CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS

The more systematic, linguistic-oriented,

approach to the study of translation began to emerge in the 1950s and 1960s. There are a number of now classic examples:

STUDY OF TRANSLATION

Alfred Malblanc (1944/1963) had done the same for translation between French and German

Georges Mounin’s Les problèmes théoriques de la traduction (1963) exam-ined linguistic issues of translation

Eugene Nida (1964a) incorporated elements of Chomsky’s then fashionable generative grammar as a theoretical underpinning of his books, which were initially designed to be practical manuals for Bible translators.

This more systematic approach began to mark

out the territory of the ‘scientific’ investigation of translation.

The word science was used by Nida in the title of his 1964 book ( Toward a Science of Translating, 1964a).