Translation
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text.[1] The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between translating (a written text) and interpreting (oral or signed communication between users of different languages); under this distinction, translation can begin only after the appearance of writing within a language community.
This article is about language translation. For other uses, see Translation (disambiguation).
A translator always risks inadvertently introducing source-language words, grammar, or syntax into the target-language rendering. On the other hand, such "spill-overs" have sometimes imported useful source-language calques and loanwords that have enriched target languages. Translators, including early translators of sacred texts, have helped shape the very languages into which they have translated.[2]
Because of the laboriousness of the translation process, since the 1940s efforts have been made, with varying degrees of success, to automate translation or to mechanically aid the human translator.[3] More recently, the rise of the Internet has fostered a world-wide market for translation services and has facilitated "language localisation".[4]
a very good knowledge of the language, written and spoken, from which they are translating (the source language);
an excellent command of the language into which they are translating (the target language);
familiarity with the subject matter of the text being translated;
a profound understanding of the and idiomatic correlates between the two languages, including sociolinguistic register when appropriate; and
etymological
a finely tuned sense of when to metaphrase ("translate literally") and when to paraphrase, so as to assure true rather than spurious between the source and target language texts.[64]
equivalents
Survey translation[edit]
A survey questionnaire consists of a list of questions and answer categories aimed at extracting data from a particular group of people about their attitude, behavior, or knowledge. In cross-national and cross-cultural survey research, translation is crucial to collecting comparable data.[153][154] Originally developed for the European Social Surveys, the model TRAPD (Translation, Review, Adjudication, Pretest, and Documentation) is now "widely used in the global survey research community, although not always labeled as such or implemented in its complete form".[155][156][157]
A team approach is recommended in the survey-translation process, to include translators, subject-matter experts, and persons helpful to the process.[158] For example, even when project managers and researchers do not speak the language of the translation, they know the study objectives well and the intent behind the questions, and therefore have a key role in improving the translation.[159] In addition, a survey-translation framework based on sociolinguistics states that a linguistically appropriate translation cannot be wholly sufficient to achieve the communicative effect of the source-language survey; the translation must also incorporate the social practices and cultural norms of the target language.[160]
Armstrong, Rebecca, "All Kinds of Unlucky" (review of The , translated by Shadi Bartsch, Profile, November 2020, ISBN 978 1 78816 267 8, 400 pp.), London Review of Books, vol. 43, no. 5 (4 March 2021), pp. 35–36.
Aeneid
Baker, Mona; Saldanha, Gabriela (2008). Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. New York: Routledge. 9780415369305.
ISBN
(1984). L'épreuve de l'étranger: culture et traduction dans l'Allemagne romantique: Herder, Goethe, Schlegel, Novalis, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin (in French). Paris: Gallimard, Essais. ISBN 9782070700769. Excerpted in English in Venuti, Lawrence (2004) [2002]. The translation studies reader (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415319201.
Berman, Antoine
(1995). Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne (in French). Paris: Gallimard. ISBN 9782070733354. English translation: Berman, Antoine (2009). Toward a translation criticism: John Donne. Translated by Massardier-Kenney, Françoise. Ohio: Kent State University Press. ISBN 9781606350096.
Berman, Antoine
Billiani, Francesca (2001), "Ethics", in Baker, Mona (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, New York: Routledge, 9780415255172.
ISBN
"In Praise of Ambiguity" (a review of Michael Wood, On Empson, Princeton University Press, 2017), The New York Review of Books), vol. LXIV, no. 16 (26 October 2017), pp. 50–52.
Bromwich, David
Darwish, Ali (1999). "Towards a theory of constraints in translation".
{{}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help) Work in progress version (pdf).
cite journal
"Eleven Pleasures of Translating", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIII, no. 19 (8 December 2016), pp. 22–24. "I like to reproduce the word order, and the order of ideas, of the original [text] whenever possible. [p. 22] [T]ranslation is, eternally, a compromise. You settle for the best you can do rather than achieving perfection, though there is the occasional perfect solution [to the problem of finding an equivalent expression in the target language]." (p. 23.)
Davis, Lydia
Fatani, Afnan, "Translation and the Qur'an", in , The Qur'an: An Encyclopaedia, Routledge, 2006, pp. 657–69.
Oliver Leaman
, Jonathan (June 2000). "FEATURE: Como conversazione: on translation". The Paris Review. 42 (155): 255–312. Poets and critics Seamus Heaney, Charles Tomlinson, Tim Parks, and others discuss the theory and practice of translation.
Galassi
Godayol, Pilar (February 2013). "Metaphors, women and translation: from les belles infidèles to la frontera". . 7 (1): 97–116. doi:10.1558/genl.v7i1.97.
Gender and Language
"Corrections of Taste" (review of Terry Eagleton, Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read, Yale University Press, 323 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIX, no. 15 (6 October 2022), pp. 16–18.
Gorra, Michael
"Can We Ever Master King Lear?", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 3 (23 February 2017), pp. 34–36.
Greenblatt, Stephen
Hays, Gregory, "Found in Translation" (review of , Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature, Harvard University Press), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 11 (22 June 2017), pp. 56, 58.
Denis Feeney
Kaiser, Walter, "A Hero of Translation" (a review of Jean Findlay, Chasing Lost Time: The Life of : Soldier, Spy, and Translator, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 351 pp., $30.00), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXII, no. 10 (4 June 2015), pp. 54–56.
C.K. Scott Moncrieff
(1983). "The translator's endless toil (book reviews)". The Polish Review. XXVIII (2): 83–87. JSTOR 25777966. Includes a discussion of European-language cognates of the term, "translation".
Kasparek, Christopher
translator's foreword to Bolesław Prus, Pharaoh, translated from the Polish, with foreword and notes, by Christopher Kasparek, Amazon Kindle e-book, 2020, ASIN:BO8MDN6CZV.
Kasparek, Christopher
Kelly, Louis (1979). The true interpreter: A history of translation theory and practice in the West. New York: St. Martin's Press. 9780631196402.
ISBN
"A Magician of Chinese Poetry" (review of Eliot Weinberger, with an afterword by Octavio Paz, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (with More Ways), New Directions, 88 pp., $10.95 [paper]; and Eliot Weinberger, The Ghosts of Birds, New Directions, 211 pp., $16.95 [paper]), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIII, no. 18 (24 November 2016), pp. 49–50.
Link, Perry
"Am I Human?: Researchers need new ways to distinguish artificial intelligence from the natural kind", Scientific American, vol. 316, no. 3 (March 2017), pp. 58–63. Multiple tests of artificial-intelligence efficacy are needed because, "just as there is no single test of athletic prowess, there cannot be one ultimate test of intelligence." One such test, a "Construction Challenge", would test perception and physical action—"two important elements of intelligent behavior that were entirely absent from the original Turing test." Another proposal has been to give machines the same standardized tests of science and other disciplines that schoolchildren take. A so far insuperable stumbling block to artificial intelligence is an incapacity for reliable disambiguation. "[V]irtually every sentence [that people generate] is ambiguous, often in multiple ways." A prominent example is known as the "pronoun disambiguation problem": a machine has no way of determining to whom or what a pronoun in a sentence—such as "he", "she" or "it"—refers.
Marcus, Gary
McNamara, Charles, "Lead Us Not into Temptation? Francis Is Not the First to Question a Key Phrase of the Lord's Prayer", , 1 January 2018. [3]
Commonweal
(1983). The history of Polish literature (2nd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 9780520044777.
Miłosz, Czesław
"Whole Earth Troubador" (review of The Essential W.S. Merwin, edited by Michael Wiegers, Copper Canyon, 338 pp., 2017), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 19 (7 December 2017), pp. 45–46.
Mlinko, Ange
"Painters and Writers: When Something New Happens", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 1 (19 January 2017), pp. 33–35.
Muhlstein, Anka
Munday, Jeremy (2016). . London/New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-1138912557.
Introducing Translation Studies: theories and applications (4th ed.)
North, Anna (20 November 2017). . Vox. Retrieved 9 September 2020.
"Historically, men translated the Odyssey. Here's what happened when a woman took the job"
(2007). Translating style: a literary approach to translation - a translation approach to literature. New York: Routledge. ISBN 9781905763047.
Parks, Tim
(1984). The story of language. New York: New American Library. ISBN 9780452008700. Introduction by Stuart Berg Flexner, revised edition.
Pei, Mario
(1994). Le défi des langues: du gâchis au bon sens [The language challenge: from chaos to common sense] (in French). Paris: L'Harmattan. ISBN 9782738424327.
Piron, Claude
Polizzotti, Mark, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, MIT, 168 pp., 2018, 978 0 262 03799 0.
ISBN
Islam in the World, Granta, 2006, ISBN 978-1-86207-906-9.
Ruthven, Malise
"The Islamic Road to the Modern World" (review of Christopher de Bellaigue, The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times, Liveright; and Wael Abu-'Uksa, Freedom in the Arab World: Concepts and Ideologies in Arabic Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 11 (22 June 2017), pp. 22, 24–25.
Ruthven, Malise
Schleiermacher, Friedrich (2004) [2002], "On the different methods of translating (Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens 1813)", in (ed.), The translation studies reader, translated by Bernofsky, Susan (2nd ed.), New York: Routledge, pp. 43–63, ISBN 9780415319201.
Venuti, Lawrence
; Schopp, Jürgen F. (2013). "Translation", European History Online, Mainz, Institute of European History, retrieved 29 August 2013.
Snell-Hornby, Mary
(1980). A history of six ideas: an essay in aesthetics. Translated by Kasparek, Christopher. The Hague, Boston, London: Martinus Nijhoff. ISBN 978-8301008246.
Tatarkiewicz, Władysław
O doskonałości (On Perfection), Warsaw, Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1976; English translation by Christopher Kasparek subsequently serialized in Dialectics and Humanism: The Polish Philosophical Quarterly, vol. VI, no. 4 (autumn 1979)—vol. VIII, no 2 (spring 1981), and reprinted in Władysław Tatarkiewicz, On Perfection, Warsaw University Press, Center of Universalism, 1992, pp. 9–51 (the book is a collection of papers by and about Professor Tatarkiewicz).
Tatarkiewicz, Władysław
Taylor, Paul, "Insanely Complicated, Hopelessly Inadequate" (review of , The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment, MIT, October 2019, ISBN 978 0 262 04304 5, 157 pp.; Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust, Ballantine, September 2019, ISBN 978 1 5247 4825 8, 304 pp.; Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie, The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect, Penguin, May 2019, ISBN 978 0 14 198241 0, 418 pp.), London Review of Books, vol. 43, no. 2 (21 January 2021), pp. 37–39.
Brian Cantwell Smith
Vélez, Fabio (2016). Antes de Babel. Una historia retórica de la traducción. Granada, Spain: Comares. 978-8490454718.
ISBN
"The Politics of Translation" (a review of Kate Briggs, This Little Art, 2017; Mireille Gansel, Translation as Transhumance, translated by Ros Schwartz, 2017; Mark Polizzotti, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, 2018; Boyd Tonkin, ed., The 100 Best Novels in Translation, 2018; Clive Scott, The Work of Literary Translation, 2018), London Review of Books, vol. 40, no. 19 (11 October 2018), pp. 21–24.
Warner, Marina
"A Doggish Translation" (review of The Poems of Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, and The Shield of Herakles, translated from the Greek by Barry B. Powell, University of California Press, 2017, 184 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXV, no. 1 (18 January 2018), pp. 34–36.
Wilson, Emily
"Ah, how miserable!" (review of three separate translations of The Oresteia by Aeschylus: by Oliver Taplin, Liveright, November 2018; by Jeffrey Scott Bernstein, Carcanet, April 2020; and by David Mulroy, Wisconsin, April 2018), London Review of Books, vol. 42, no. 19 (8 October 2020), pp. 9–12, 14.
Wilson, Emily
"The Pleasures of Translation" (review of Mark Polizzotti, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, MIT Press, 2018, 182 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXV, no. 9 (24 May 2018), pp. 46–47.
Wilson, Emily
"Break your bleedin' heart" (review of Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, translated by James Grieve, NYRB, June 2023, ISBN 978 1 68137 6295, 450 pp.; and Marcel Proust, The Swann Way, translated by Brian Nelson, Oxford, September 2023, ISBN 978 0 19 8871521, 430 pp.), London Review of Books, vol. 46, no. 1 (4 January 2024), pp. 37–38.
Michael Wood
Zethsen, Karen Korning; Askehave, Inger (February 2013). "Talking translation: Is gender an issue?". . 7 (1): 117–134. doi:10.1558/genl.v7i1.117.
Gender and Language
Abu-Mahfouz, Ahmad (2008). (PDF). Journal of Translation. 4 (1): 1–5. doi:10.54395/jot-x8fne. S2CID 62020741. Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 March 2012.
"Translation as a Blending of Cultures"
"We possess all things" (review of Henrietta Harrison, The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire, Princeton, 2022, ISBN 978 0 691 22545 6, 341 pp.), London Review of Books, vol. 44, no. 16 (18 August 2022), pp. 31–32. "Historians have fastened their attention on the letters that passed from George III to the Qianlong emperor and back again. But... written texts are not so fixed as one might assume. Neither the Chinese nor the British officials read the originals of the messages from the other side; they were content to receive translations... In such circumstances... meanings become elusive. More than king, emperor or ambassador, the translators decided the substance of the exchange. Historians have tended to attribute meaning to the speakers and not to their humble interpreters. But... it was the intermediaries – ambassadors, negotiators, translators – who delivered the meanings. The important persons in this process were those in between." (p. 32.)
Crossley, Pamela
The Art of Clear Thinking, chapter 5: "Danger! Language at Work" (pp. 35–42), chapter 6: "The Pursuit of Translation" (pp. 43–50), Barnes & Noble Books, 1973.
Flesch, Rudolf
"A Murder Mystery Puzzle: The literary puzzle Cain's Jawbone, which has stumped humans for decades, reveals the limitations of natural-language-processing algorithms", Scientific American, vol. 329, no. 4 (November 2023), pp. 81–82. "This murder mystery competition has revealed that although NLP (natural-language processing) models are capable of incredible feats, their abilities are very much limited by the amount of context they receive. This [...] could cause [difficulties] for researchers who hope to use them to do things such as analyze ancient languages. In some cases, there are few historical records on long-gone civilizations to serve as training data for such a purpose." (p. 82.)
Hughes-Castleberry, Kenna
Kelly, Nataly; Zetzsche, Jost (2012). Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World. TarcherPerigee. 978-0399537974.
ISBN
Nabokov, Vladimir (4 August 1941). . The New Republic. Retrieved 19 January 2020.
"The Art of Translation"
Ross Amos, Flora, "Early Theories of Translation", Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature, 1920. At .
Project Gutenberg
Sharma, Sandeep (2017). . There's a Double Tongue. HP University: 1.
"Translation and Translation Studies"
"Mother Tongue: Emily Wilson makes Homer modern", The New Yorker, 18 September 2023, pp. 46–53. A biography, and presentation of the translation theories and practices, of Emily Wilson. "'As a translator, I was determined to make the whole human experience of the poems accessible,' Wilson said." (p. 47.)
Thurman, Judith
Wechsler, Robert, , Catbird Press, 1998.
Performing Without a Stage: The Art of Literary Translation
"A Wild and Indecent Book" (review of David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation, Yale University Press, 577 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXV, no. 2 (8 February 2018), pp. 34–35. Discusses some pitfalls in interpreting and translating the New Testament