A Civilising Force: A Brief Overview of the History of Translation

Most of the world’s past comes to us in translation. It may not overstate the case to claim that the history of the world could be told through the history of translation. Indeed, one might even assert that, without translation, there is no history of the world.

Louis Gerard Kelly, historian of translation (born 1935)

The art of translation goes as far back as written literature itself. The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (about 2200 BCE), one of the oldest known literary works, was translated into several Southwest Asian languages as early as the second millennium BCE. In the early Christian era, Illyrian Christian priest Saint Jerome (about 347-420) translated the Bible into Latin from the original Greek and Hebrew. His translation, which become known as the Vulgate, is still an important text in Catholicism today. Revered as one of the greatest translators of all time for this achievement, Saint Jerome is the Paton Saint of Translators.
 

In earlier ages, education and scholarship were largely confined to a very small class of aristocrats and clergy. This explains why monks played an important role in spreading Buddhist texts in Asia and the Bible in Early Modern Europe. Through this work, the clergy not only acted as bridges transferring knowledge and ideas across cultures and civilisations. In addition, they also shaped the languages into which they translated, for often ideas could not be conveyed in the target language without importing, thereby extending the range of expression of the local language by introducing loanwords and even entire idioms and grammatical structures from the source language (see “The Role of Translators in the Evolution of Cultures and Languages”). Through this collective effort, monks and translators in general have had an enormous civilising influence in Europe.

But the role of translation in history does not end there, for it was translations of the Bible into local European languages that brought about the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s rendition of the Bible in German was instrumental in bringing about a split in Western Christianity into Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Disparities in crucial words and passages between Catholic and Protestant versions of received Christian texts stemming from different translations subsequently deepened the schism between the two versions of Christian faith. An intellectual divide of unprecedented proportions in European history, the Protest Revolution played a significant role in the rise of Modern Europe, for it emphasised the importance of first-hand knowledge of the Bible and hence of critical reading and intellectual independence. The availability of the Bible in local European vernaculars such as Luther’s rendition in German, Jakub Wuejk’s Polish Bible and the King James Bible in English all fostered emancipation from the Catholic clergy as the traditional mediators between believers and God. It is not surprising, then, that these texts had lasting effects on the religions, cultures and languages of various parts of Europe.

Another translation feat of great historical significance was the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone by French philologist and orientalist Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832). An ancient Egyptian stele (stone slab) created in 196 BCE, the Rosetta Stone was discovered by French troops at Rosetta in 1799. On the artefact, the same tax decree issued by Ptolemy V (204-181 BCE), ruler of the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt during the Hellenistic period, is inscribed in three ancient languages: Hieroglyphic, Demotic (both Egyptian language scripts) and classical Greek.

When he set to work on the Rosetta Stone from 1822 to 1824, Champollion already knew Greek and Coptic, the latter being an Egyptian script incorporating an adapted Greek alphabet with the addition of seven signs from the earlier demotic script to represent Egyptian sounds that Greek did not have. Benefitting partly from the groundwork done by scholarly predecessors, Champollion first inferred from the use of those seven signs what their meaning was in Demotic. As a next step he traced the Demotic characters back to hieroglyphic sings. Having discovered what some hieroglyphs stood for, the French scholar then transliterated the text from the Demotic and Greek to the hieroglyphs and was able to show that the Egyptian writing system was a combination of phonetic and ideographic signs. Since Champollion’s work was instrumental in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphic writing his discovery provided the key to ancient Egyptian culture and ultimately gave rise Egyptology as a scholarly discipline.

114 cm high, 72 cm wide and 28 cm thick, the Rosetta Stone weighs some 760 kg. The artefact with its Hieroglyphic (top) Demotic (middle) and Greek (bottom) inscriptions has been on public display at The British Museum since 1802.

A rise in general education levels since the Industrial Revolution has influenced the practice of translation in the long run. The first professional translation associations emerged in the early twentieth century, and the translation industry has been increasingly professionalised since the end of the Second World War. It is noteworthy that the study of foreign languages has little effect on the demand for translation and even interpretation. Despite strong growth in language learning since the 1960s, both the translation and interpretation industry have grown exponentially.