Interesting Facts on Translation and Translators

Even though translation has been around as long as the language, translation as a systematic study and a profession emerged much later. Although there is no definitive historical indication, the first person to be considered a professional translator is Saint Jerome who is known for his Bible translation. He was born around the year 340 and started to translate the Bible in 382 and finished in 405. He used Hebrew and Greek versions as the source text.

Interestingly enough the Bible is the most translated text in the history of translation. One of the reasons of its prominence in translational statistics is that it has three source text in three different languages, namely Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. It is followed by the famous French novella the Little Prince published in 1943 by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and the third most translated text is the children’s novel Pinocchio in Italian by Carlo Collodi in 1883.

If we do not count the biblical authors, Agatha Christie is the first author whose works are translated the most. Her works in English have been translated into 103 different target languages. She is followed by the French author Jules Verne, and the third most translated author is the English author William Shakespeare.

Although the idea of using machines as a translator emerged throughout history, the first real example of the machine translation technology was demonstrated in 1954. It was a cooperative project done by the technological corporation IBM and Georgetown University. Though the translation machine they were able to translate short text of different matters such as law, science and international affairs from Russian into English. They were short and simple texts, but this experimental project paved the way for today’s high technology machine translators.

When we talk about how easy or difficult it is to translate from a language to another, it is about how closely related the source and target languages are. In the world there are four biggest language families: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo and Austronesian. If two languages are from different language families, it is harder to translate from one into the other. For example, being Indo-European languages it is easier to translate English into Spanish than into Chinese as it is in a different language family, namely Sino-Tibetan.

Sources:

https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=666

https://avo-translations.co.uk/7-hardest-languages-to-translate-into-english