Western theory

Discussions of the theory and practice of translation reach back into antiquity and show
remarkable continuities. The ancient Greeks distinguished between metaphrase (literal
translation) and paraphrase. This distinction was adopted by English poet and translator John
Dryden (16311700), who described translation as the judicious blending of these two modes of
phrasing when selecting, in the target language, "counterparts," or equivalents, for the
expressions used in the source language:

When [words] appear... literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be
changed. But since... what is beautiful in one [language] is often barbarous, nay sometimes
nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of
his author's words: tis enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate the
sense.

Dryden cautioned, however, against the license of "imitation", i.e., of adapted translation:
"When a painter copies from the life... he has no privilege to alter features and lineaments..

This general formulation of the central concept of translation equivalence is as adequate

Despite occasional theoretical diversity, the actual practice of translation has hardly changed
since antiquity. Except for some extreme metaphrasers in the early Christian period and the
Middle Ages, and adapters in various periods (especially pre-Classical Rome, and the 18th
century), translators have generally shown prudent flexibility in seeking equivalents "literal"
where possible, paraphrastic where necessary for the original meaning and other crucial
"values" (e.g., style, verse form, concordance with musical accompaniment or, in films, with
speech articulatory movements) as determined from context.
In general, translators have sought to preserve the context itself by reproducing the original
order of sememes, and hence word order when necessary, reinterpreting the actual
grammatical structure, for example, by shifting from active to passive voice, or vice versa. The
grammatical differences between "fixed-word-order" languages[14] (e.g. English, French,
German) and "free-word-order" languages[15] (e.g., Greek, Latin, Polish, Russian) have been no
impediment in this regard.[12] The particular syntax (sentence-structure) characteristics of a
text's source language are adjusted to the syntactic requirements of the target language.

When a target language has lacked terms that are found in a source language, translators have
borrowed those terms, thereby enriching the target language. Thanks in great measure to the
exchange of calques and loanwords between languages, and to their importation from other
languages, there are few concepts that are "untranslatable" among the modern European
languages.

Generally, the greater the contact and exchange that have existed between two languages, or
between those languages and a third one, the greater is the ratio of metaphrase to paraphrase
that may be used in translating among them. However, due to shifts in ecological niches of
words, a common etymology is sometimes misleading as a guide to current meaning in one or
the other language. For example, the English actual should not be confused with the cognate
French actuel ("present", "current"), the Polish aktualny ("present", "current," "topical,"
"timely," "feasible"),[17] the Swedish aktuell ("topical", "presently of importance"), the Russian
("urgent", "topical") or the Dutch actueel ("current").

The translator's role as a bridge for "carrying across" values between cultures has been
discussed at least since Terence, the 2nd-century-BCE Roman adapter of Greek comedies. The
translator's role is, however, by no means a passive, mechanical one, and so has also been
compared to that of an artist. The main ground seems to be the concept of parallel creation
found in critics such as Cicero. Dryden observed that "Translation is a type of drawing after
life..." Comparison of the translator with a musician or actor goes back at least to Samuel
Johnsons remark about Alexander Pope playing Homer on a flageolet, while Homer himself
used a bassoon.

If translation be an art, it is no easy one. In the 13th century, Roger Bacon wrote that if a
translation is to be true, the translator must know both languages, as well as the science that he
is to translate; and finding that few translators did, he wanted to do away with translation and
translators altogether.
The translator of the Bible into German, Martin Luther, is credited with being the first European
to posit that one translates satisfactorily only toward his own language. L.G. Kelly states that
since Johann Gottfried Herder in the 18th century, "it has been axiomatic" that one translates
only toward his own language.

Compounding the demands on the translator is the fact that no dictionary or thesaurus can ever
be a fully adequate guide in translating. The Scottish historian Alexander Tytler, in his Essay on
the Principles of Translation (1790), emphasized that assiduous reading is a more
comprehensive guide to a language than are dictionaries. The same point, but also including
listening to the spoken language, had earlier, in 1783, been made by the Polish poet and
grammarian Onufry Andrzej Kopczyski.

The translators special role in society is described in a posthumous 1803 essay by "Poland's La
Fontaine", the Roman Catholic Primate of Poland, poet, encyclopedist, author of the first Polish
novel, and translator from French and Greek, Ignacy Krasicki:

[T]ranslation... is in fact an art both estimable and very difficult, and therefore is not the
labor and portion of common minds; [it] should be [practiced] by those who are themselves
capable of being actors, when they see greater use in translating the works of others than in
their own works, and hold higher than their own glory the service that they render their
country.

Due to Western colonialism and cultural dominance in recent centuries, Western translation
traditions have largely replaced other traditions. The Western traditions draw on both ancient
and medieval traditions, and on more recent European innovations.

Though earlier approaches to translation are less commonly used today, they retain importance
when dealing with their products, as when historians view ancient or medieval records to piece
together events which took place in non-Western or pre-Western environments. Also, though
heavily influenced by Western traditions and practiced by translators taught in Western-style
educational systems, Chinese and related translation traditions retain some theories and
philosophies unique to the Chinese tradition.
Eastern Theory
Near East
The traditions of translating material among Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Syriac, Anatolian and
Hebrew go back several millennia. An early example of a bilingual document is the 1274 BCE
Treaty of Kadesh.

Asia
Further information: Chinese translation theory

Diamond Sutra, translated by Kumrajva

There is a separate tradition of translation in South, Southeast and East Asia (primarily of texts
from the Indian and Chinese civilizations), connected especially with the rendering of religious,
particularly Buddhist, texts and with the governance of the Chinese empire. Classical Indian
translation is characterized by loose adaptation, rather than the closer translation more
commonly found in Europe; and Chinese translation theory identifies various criteria and
limitations in translation.

In the East Asian sphere of Chinese cultural influence, more important than translation per se
has been the use and reading of Chinese texts, which also had substantial influence on the
Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages, with substantial borrowings of Chinese vocabulary
and writing system. Notable is the Japanese kanbun, a system for glossing Chinese texts for
Japanese speakers.

Though Indianized states in Southeast Asia often translated Sanskrit material into the local
languages, the literate elites and scribes more commonly used Sanskrit as their primary
language of culture and government.

Some special aspects of translating from Chinese are illustrated in Perry Link's discussion of
translating the work of the Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei (699759 CE).
 Some of the art of classical Chinese poetry [writes Link] must simply be set aside as
untranslatable. The internal structure of Chinese characters has a beauty of its own, and the
calligraphy in which classical poems were written is another important but untranslatable
dimension. Since Chinese characters do not vary in length, and because there are exactly five
characters per line in a poem like [the one that Eliot Weinberger discusses in 19 Ways of Looking
at Wang Wei (with More Ways)], another untranslatable feature is that the written result, hung
on a wall, presents a rectangle. Translators into languages whose word lengths vary can
reproduce such an effect only at the risk of fatal awkwardness....

Another imponderable is how to imitate the 1-2, 1-2-3 rhythm in which five-syllable lines in
classical Chinese poems normally are read. Chinese characters are pronounced in one syllable
apiece, so producing such rhythms in Chinese is not hard and the results are unobtrusive; but
any imitation in a Western language is almost inevitably stilted and distracting. Even less
translatable are the patterns of tone arrangement in classical Chinese poetry. Each syllable
(character) belongs to one of two categories determined by the pitch contour in which it is read;
in a classical Chinese poem the patterns of alternation of the two categories exhibit parallelism
and mirroring.

Once the untranslatables have been set aside, the problems for a translator, especially of
Chinese poetry, are two: What does the translator think the poetic line says? And once he thinks
he understands it, how can he render it into the target language? Most of the difficulties,
according to Link, arise in addressing the second problem, "where the impossibility of perfect
answers spawns endless debate." Almost always at the center is the letter-versus-spirit
dilemma. At the literalist extreme, efforts are made to dissect every conceivable detail about
the language of the original Chinese poem. "The dissection, though," writes Link, "normally does
to the art of a poem approximately what the scalpel of an anatomy instructor does to the life of
a frog."

Chinese characters, in avoiding grammatical specificity, offer advantages to poets (and,

It is the norm in classical Chinese poetry, and common even in modern Chinese prose, to omit
subjects; the reader or listener infers a subject. Western languages, however, ask by
grammatical rule that subjects always be stated. Most of the translators cited in Eliot
Weinberger's 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei supply a subject. Weinberger points out,
however, that when an "I" as a subject is inserted, a "controlling individual mind of the poet"
enters and destroys the effect of the Chinese line. Without a subject, he writes, "the experience
becomes both universal and immediate to the reader." Another approach to the subjectlessness
is to use the target language's passive voice; but this again particularizes the experience too
much.

Nouns have no number in Chinese. "If," writes Link, "you want to talk in Chinese about one rose,
you may, but then you use a "measure word" to say "one blossom-of roseness."

Chinese verbs are tense-less: there are several ways to specify when something happened or
will happen, but verb tense is not one of them. For poets, this creates the great advantage of
ambiguity. According to Link, Weinberger's insight about subjectlessnessthat it produces an
effect "both universal and immediate"applies to timelessness as well.

Link proposes a kind of uncertainty principle that may be applicable not only to translation from
the Chinese language, but to all translation:

Dilemmas about translation do not have definitive right answers (although there can be
unambiguously wrong ones if misreadings of the original are involved). Any translation (except
machine translation, a different case) must pass through the mind of a translator, and that mind
inevitably contains its own store of perceptions, memories, and values.

Weinberger [...] pushes this insight further when he writes that "every reading of every poem,
regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader's intellectual and
emotional life." Then he goes still further: because a reader's mental life shifts over time, there
is a sense in which "the same poem cannot be read twice."
Islamic Theory

Islamic world

Translation of material into Arabic expanded after the creation of Arabic script in the 5th
century, and gained great importance with the rise of Islam and Islamic empires. Arab
translation initially focused primarily on politics, rendering Persian, Greek, even Chinese and
Indic diplomatic materials into Arabic. It later focused on translating classical Greek and Persian
works, as well as some Chinese and Indian texts, into Arabic for scholarly study at major Islamic
learning centers, such as the Al-Karaouine (Fes, Morocco), Al-Azhar (Cairo, Egypt), and the Al-
Nizamiyya of Baghdad. In terms of theory, Arabic translation drew heavily on earlier Near
Eastern traditions as well as more contemporary Greek and Persian traditions.

Arabic translation efforts and techniques are important to Western translation traditions due to
centuries of close contacts and exchanges. Especially after the Renaissance, Europeans began
more intensive study of Arabic and Persian translations of classical works as well as scientific
and philosophical works of Arab and oriental origins. Arabic and, to a lesser degree, Persian
became important sources of material and perhaps of techniques for revitalized Western
traditions, which in time would overtake the Islamic and oriental traditions.

In the 19th century, after the Middle East's Islamic clerics and copyists

had conceded defeat in their centuries-old battle to contain the corrupting effects of the
printing press, [an] explosion in publishing... ensued. Along with expanding secular education,
printing transformed an overwhelmingly illiterate society into a partly literate one.

In the past, the sheikhs and the government had exercised a monopoly over knowledge. Now
an expanding elite benefitted from a stream of information on virtually anything that interested
them. Between 1880 and 1908... more than six hundred newspapers and periodicals were
founded in Egypt alone.
 The most prominent among them was al-Muqtataf... [It] was the popular expression of a
translation movement that had begun earlier in the century with military and medical manuals
and highlights from the Enlightenment canon. (Montesquieu's Considerations on the Romans
and Fnelon's Telemachus had been favorites.)

The movement to translate English and European texts transformed the Arabic and Ottoman
Turkish languages, and new words, simplified syntax, and directness came to be valued over the
previous convolutions. Educated Arabs and Turks in the new professions and the modernized
civil service expressed skepticism, writes Christopher de Bellaigue, "with a freedom that is rarely
witnessed today.... No longer was legitimate knowledge defined by texts in the religious schools,
interpreted for the most part with stultifying literalness. It had come to include virtually any
intellectual production anywhere in the world." One of the neologisms that, in a way, came to
characterize the infusion of new ideas via translation was "darwiniya", or "Darwinism".

One of the most influential liberal Islamic thinkers of the time was Muhammad Abduh (1849
1905), Egypt's senior judicial authorityits chief muftiat the turn of the 20th century and an
admirer of Darwin who in 1903 visited Darwin's exponent Herbert Spencer at his home in
Brighton. Spencer's view of society as an organism with its own laws of evolution paralleled
Abduh's ideas.

After World War I, when Britain and France divided up the Middle East's countries, apart from
Turkey, between them, pursuant to the Sykes-Picot agreementin violation of solemn wartime
promises of postwar Arab autonomythere came an immediate reaction: the Muslim
Brotherhood emerged in Egypt, the House of Saud took over the Hijaz, and regimes led by army
officers came to power in Iran and Turkey. "[B]oth illiberal currents of the modern Middle East,"
writes de Bellaigue, "Islamism and militarism, received a major impetus from Western empire-
builders." As often happens in countries undergoing social crisis, the aspirations of the Muslim
world's translators and modernizers, such as Muhammad Abduh, largely had to yield to
retrograde currents.