Interpreters and translators of the Persian and Indian languages are known to have been employed in Europe in the fourth century BC by Alexander the Great (356-323), the emperor of Macedonia, during his military campaign against Persia and India.
Interpreters and translators of the Persian and Indian languages are known to have been employed in Europe in the fourth century BC by Alexander the Great (356-323), the emperor of Macedonia, during his military campaign against Persia and India. Romans in their numerous wars also employed interpreters/translators (especially during the Punic Wars with Carthage in the second and third centuries BC). Unfortunately, little or nothing is practically known about the employment of translation in state affairs in other European countries of those times, though translators/interpreters must certainly have been employed on the same occasions and with the same purposes as in the Middle East. The inevitable employment of translation/interpretation was predetermined by the need to maintain intercommunal and international relations which always exist between different ethnic groups as well as between separate nations and their individual representatives.
Used during the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
Also employed during the WW I, II for spying, examination/questioning of prisoners of war, searching for prominent scholars and kidnapping them. During the WW II the English and the French exported Danish scientist Niels Bohr who then worked in Sweden and Great Britain.
5. The Septuagint and the historically first principle of translation.
The history of European translation, however, is known to have started as far back as 280 BC with the translation of some excerpts of The Holy Scriptures1. The real history of translation into European languages, however, is supposed to have begun in 250 BC in the Egyptian city of Alexandria which belonged to the great Greek empire. The local leaders of the Jewish community there decided to translate the Old Testament from Hebrew, which had once been their native tongue, but which was no longer understood, into ancient Greek, which became their spoken language. Tradition states that 72 learned Jews, each working separately, prepared during their translation in 70 days the Greek variant of the Hebrew original. When the translators met, according to that same tradition, their translations were found to be identical to each other in every word. In reality, however, the Septuagint (Latin for seventy), as this translation has been called since then, took in fact several hundreds of years to complete. According to reliable historical sources2, various translators worked on the Septuagint after that, each having made his individual contribution to this fundamental document of Christianity in his national language.
The bulk of the Septuagint is known today to have been a slavishly literal (word-for-word) translation of the original Jewish Scripture. Much later around 130 AD another Jewish translator, Aguila of Sinope, made one more slavishly literal translation of the Old Testament to replace the Septuagint.
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There were also other Greek translations of the Old Testament, which are unfortunately lost to us today. Consequently, only the Septuagint can be subjected to a thorough analysis from the point of view of the principles, the method and the level of its literary translation.
One of several available graphic examples of slavish literalism, i.e., of strict word-for-word translation both at the lexical/semantic and structural level, may be seen in the Old Slavonic translations of the Bible from the Kyivan Rus' period as well as during the succeeding centuries. This may easily be noticed even from the latest (1992 and 1997) Ukrainian publications of the Holy Scriptures.
6. Aquilas translation of the Old Testament.
Aquila "Ponticus" (fl. 130 AD) of Sinope (modern-day Sinop, Turkey) was a translator of the Old Testament into Greek, proselyte, and disciple of Rabbi Akiva.[1][2]
Only fragments of this translation have survived in what remains of fragmentary documents taken from the Books of Kings and the Psalms found in the old Cairo Geniza in Fustat, Egypt,
In Jewish writings he is referred to as עקילס (Aquilas). Aquila's version is said to have been used in place of the Septuagint in Greek-speaking synagogues. The Christians generally disliked it, alleging that it rendered the Messianic passages incorrectly, but Jerome and Origen speak in its praise. Origen incorporated it in his Hexapla. [5]
The surviving fragments of this translation, and of other Greek translations forming part of Origen's Hexapla, are now being re-published (with additional materials discovered since Field's edition) by an international group of Septuagint scholars. This work is being carried out as The Hexapla Project [6] under the auspices of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies,[7] and directed by Peter J. Gentry (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary), Alison G. Salvesen (University of Oxford), and Bas ter Haar Romeny (Leiden University).
7. Symmachus translation of the Old Testament.
Much was translated in ancient times also from Greek into Egyptian and vice versa, and partly from Hebrew into Greek. The next best known translation of the Old Testament into Greek, but performed this time meaning-to-meaning/sense-to-sense, was accomplished by Simmachus in the second century BC.Later on, with the political, economic and military strengthening of the Roman Empire, more and more translations were performed from Greek into Latin. Moreover, much of the rich literature of all genres from ancient Rome has developed exclusively on the basis of translations from old Greek.
8. Jeromes Latin Vulgate.
The Vulgate (/ˈvʌlɡeɪt, -ɡɪt/) is a late fourth-century Latin translation of the Bible that became, during the 16th century, the Catholic Church's officially promulgated Latin version of the Bible.
The translation was largely the work of St. Jerome, who, in 382 AD, was commissioned by Pope Damasus I to revise the Vetus Latina ("Old Latin") collection of biblical texts in Latin then in use by the Church. Once published, it was widely adopted and eventually eclipsed the Vetus Latina and, by the 13th century, was known as the " versio vulgata " [1] (the "version commonly-used") or, more simply, in Latin as vulgata or in Greek as βουλγάτα ("Vulgate").
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The Catholic Church affirmed it as its official Latin Bible at the Council of Trent (154563 AD).
The Vulgate is usually credited as being the first translation of the Old Testament into Latin directly from the Hebrew Tanakh, rather than the Greek Septuagint. Jerome's extensive use of exegetical material written in Greek, on the other hand, as well as his use of the Aquiline and Theodotiontic columns of the Hexapla, along with the somewhat paraphrastic style in which he translated makes it difficult to determine exactly how direct the conversion of Hebrew to Latin was.
The Latin biblical texts in use before the Latin Vulgate are usually referred to collectively as the Vetus Latina, or "Old Latin Bible", or occasionally the "Old Latin Vulgate". (Here "Old Latin" means that they are older than the Vulgate and written in Latin, not that they are written in Old Latin. Likewise the Latin Vulgate was so named because it was the Latin counterpart to the Greek Vulgate; it was not written in Vulgar Latin.) The translations in the Vetus Latina had accumulated piecemeal over a century or more; they were not translated by a single person or institution, nor uniformly edited. The individual books varied in quality of translation and style, and different manuscripts witness wide variations in readings. Jerome, in his preface to the Vulgate gospels, commented that there were "as many [translations] as there are manuscripts".
The earliest known use of the term Vulgata to describe the new Latin translation was made by Roger Bacon in the 13th century.[35]
9. Translation in Ancient Rome. Livius Andronicus and his translations in the 3rd century B.C.
