CHAPTER 1: Main issues of translation studies

Key concepts
· The practice of translating is long established, but the discipline of translation
studies is new.
· A split has persisted between translation practice and theory. The study of
(usually literary) translation began through comparative literature, translation
‘workshops’ and contrastive analysis.
· James S. Holmes’s ‘The name and nature of translation studies’ is considered to
be the ‘founding statement’ of a new discipline.
· Translation studies has expanded hugely, and is now often considered an
interdiscipline.

1.1 THE CONCEPT OF TRANSLATION

The term translation itself has several meanings: it can refer to the general subject
field, the product (the text that has been translated) or the process (the act of
producing the translation, otherwise known as translating). The process of
translation between two different written languages involves the translator
changing an original written text in the original verbal language into a written text
in a different verbal language.
This type corresponds to ‘interlingual translation’ and is one of the three categories
of translation described by Jakobson:

· Intralingual translation, or ‘rewording’: ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by

means of other signs of the same language’.
· Interlingual translation, or ‘translation proper’: ‘an interpretation of verbal
signs by means of some other language’.
· Intersemiotic translation, or ‘transmutation’: ‘an interpretation of verbal signs
by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems’.
Intralingual translation would occur, for example, when we rephrase an
expression or when we summarize a text in the same language. Intersemiotic
translation would occur if a written text were translated, for example, into music,
film or painting. It is interlingual translation, between two different verbal
languages, which is the traditional, although by no means exclusive, focus of
translation studies.

1.2 WHAT IS TRANSLATION STUDIES?

Throughout history, written and spoken translations have played a crucial role in
interhuman communication, not least in providing access to important texts for
scholarship and religious purposes. Yet the study of translation as an academic
subject has only really begun in the past sixty years. In the English-speaking world,
this discipline is now generally known as ‘translation studies’, thanks to the Dutch-
based US scholar James S. Holmes.
There are two very visible ways in which translation studies has become more
prominent. First, there has been a proliferation of specialized translating and
interpreting courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.
Take the example of the UK, where the study of modern languages at university
has been in decline but where the story particularly of postgraduate courses in
interpreting and translating is very different.
The past two decades have also seen a proliferation of conferences, books and
journals on translation in many languages.
International organizations have also prospered. The Fédération Internationale des
Traducteurs, established in 1953 by the Société française des traducteurs and its
president Pierre-François Caillé, brought together national associations of
translators. In more recent years, translation studies scholars have banded
together nationally and internationally in bodies such as the Canadian Association
for Translation Studies/Association canadienne de traductologie (founded in Ottawa
in 1987), the European Society for Translation Studies (Vienna, 1992), the
European Association for Studies in Screen Translation (Cardiff, 1995) and the
International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies (Korea, 2004).
International conferences on a wide variety of themes are held in an increasing
number of countries, and there has been a dramatic increase in activity in China,
India, the Arab world, South Africa, Spain, Greece and Italy, amongst others.

1.3 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DISCIPLINE

In Western Europe the translation of the Bible was to be – for well over a thousand
years and especially during the Reformation in the sixteenth century – the
battleground of conflicting ideologies. In China, it was the translation of the
Buddhist sutras that inaugurated a long discussion on translation practice from the
first century CE.
However, although the practice of translating is long established, the study of the
field developed into an academic discipline only in the second half of the twentieth
century.
Before that, translation had normally been merely an element of language learning
in modern language courses. In fact, from the late eighteenth century to the 1960s,
language learning in secondary schools in many countries had come to be
dominated by what was known as the grammar-translation method.
The gearing of translation to language teaching and learning may partly explain
why academia considered it to be of secondary status.
Translation exercises were regarded as a means of learning a new language or of
reading a foreign language text until one had the linguistic ability to read the
original. Study of a work in translation was generally frowned upon once the
student had acquired the necessary skills to read the original.
However, the grammar-translation method fell into increasing disrepute,
particularly in many English language countries, with the rise of the direct method
or communicative approach to English language teaching in the 1960s and 1970s.
This approach placed stress on students’ natural capacity to learn language and
attempts to replicate ‘authentic’ language learning conditions in the classroom.
In the USA, translation – specifically literary translation – was promoted in
universities in the 1960s by the translation workshop concept.
Another area in which translation became the subject of research was contrastive
analysis. This is the study of two languages in contrast in an attempt to identify
general and specific differences between them. Although useful, contrastive
analysis does not, however, incorporate sociocultural and pragmatic factors, nor the
role of translation as a communicative act. Nevertheless, although sometimes
denigrated, the continued application of a linguistic approach in general, and
specific linguistic models such as generative grammar or functional grammar, has
demonstrated an inherent and gut link with translation.
The more systematic, and mostly linguistic-oriented, approach to the study of
translation began to emerge in the 1950s and 1960s.
This more ‘scientific’ approach in many ways began to mark out the territory of the
academic investigation of translation.

1.4 THE HOLMES/TOURY 'MAP'

A seminal paper in the development of the field as a distinct discipline was James
S. Holmes’s ‘The name and nature of translation studies’ (Holmes 1988b/2004).
Holmes draws attention to the limitations imposed at the time by the fact that
translation research was dispersed across older disciplines. He also stresses the
need to forge ‘other communication channels, cutting across the traditional
disciplines to reach all scholars working in the field, from whatever background’
(1988b/2004: 181).
Crucially, Holmes puts forward an overall framework, describing what translation
studies covers:
(1) the description of the phenomena of translation (descriptive translation theory);
(2) the establishment of general principles to explain and predict such phenomena
(translation theory).
The ‘theoretical’ branch is divided into general and partial theories. By ‘general’,
Holmes is referring to those writings that seek to describe or account for every type
of translation and to make generalizations that will be relevant for translation as a
whole. ‘Partial’ theoretical studies are restricted according to the parameters
discussed below.
The other branch of ‘pure’ research in Holmes’s map is descriptive. Descriptive
translation studies (DTS) has three possible foci: examination of (1) the product,
(2) the function and (3) the process:
The results of DTS research can be fed into the theoretical branch to evolve either a
general theory of translation or, more likely, partial theories of translation
‘restricted’.
Medium-restricted theories subdivide according to translation by machine and
humans, with further subdivisions according to whether the machine/computer is
working alone or as an aid to the human translator, to whether the human
translation is written or spoken and to whether spoken translation (interpreting) is
consecutive or simultaneous.
Area-restricted theories are restricted to specific languages or groups of languages
and/or cultures. Holmes notes that language-restricted theories are closely related
to work in contrastive linguistics and stylistics.
Rank-restricted theories are linguistic theories that have been restricted to a
specific level of (normally) the word or sentence. At the time Holmes was writing,
there was already a trend towards text linguistics, i.e. text-rank analysis.
Text-type restricted theories look at specific discourse types or genres; e.g.
literary, business and technical translation.

Problem-restricted theories can refer to specific problems such as equivalence – a

key issue of the 1960s and 1970s – or to a wider question of whether universals of
translated language exist.
Despite this categorization, Holmes himself is at pains to point out that several
different restrictions can apply at any one time.
The ‘applied’ branch of Holmes’s framework concerns: translator training: teaching
methods, testing techniques, curriculum design; translation aids: such as
dictionaries, grammars and information technology; translation criticism:
the evaluation of translations, including the marking of student translations and the
reviews of published translations.
Another area Holmes mentions is translation policy, where he sees the translation
scholar advising on the place of translation in society, including what place, if any,
it should occupy in the language teaching and learning curriculum.
The fact that Holmes devoted two-thirds of his attention to the ‘pure’ aspects of
theory and description surely indicates his research interests rather than a lack of
possibilities for the applied side.
‘Translation policy’ would nowadays far more likely be related to the ideology,
including language policy and hegemony, that determines translation than was the
case in Holmes’s description.

1.5 DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE 1970S

The surge in translation studies since the 1970s has seen different areas of
Holmes’s map come to the fore.
Contrastive analysis has fallen by the wayside.
The late 1970s and the 1980s also saw the rise of a descriptive approach that had
its origins in comparative literature and Russian Formalism.
The 1990s saw the incorporation of new schools and concepts, with Canadian-based
translation and gender research led by Sherry Simon, the Brazilian cannibalist
school promoted by Else Vieira, postcolonial translation theory, with the prominent
figures of the Bengali scholars Tejaswini Niranjana and Gayatri Spivak and, in the
USA, the cultural studies- oriented analysis of Lawrence Venuti, calling for greater
visibility and recognition of the translator.
An interdiscipline therefore challenges the current conventional way of thinking by
promoting and responding to new links between different types of knowledge and
technologies. It is important to point out, however, that the relationship of
translation studies to other disciplines is not fixed; this explains the changes over
the years, from a strong link to contrastive linguistics in the 1960s to the present
focus on more cultural studies perspectives and even the recent shift towards areas
such as computing and media.

It is also true that translation studies has in some places been colonized by
language departments driven by the perceived attractiveness of academic teaching
programmes centred on the practice of translation and with their own academic
prejudices.
Yet the most fascinating developments of the last few years have been the
continued emergence of new perspectives, each seeking to establish a new
‘paradigm’ in translation studies.
As the editors, with some understatement, there has been ‘a movement away from
a prescriptive approach to translation to studying what translation actually looks
like. Within this framework the choice of theory and methodology becomes
important.’ Such choice is crucial and it depends on the goals of the research and
the researchers. Even the object of study, therefore, has shifted over time, from
translation as primarily connected to language teaching and learning to the specific
study of what happens in and around translation, translating and now translators.

Summary
In this chapter we have learnt the difference among intralingual, interlingual and
intersemiotic translation, starting off with a brief historical review to understand
Translation Studies in its various dimensions. We have seen that in Roman times there
already existed the idea of translating sense for sense, and not word for word, an idea
that has continued until our days (literal versus free translations). Although the middle
ages were also relevant for the history of translation, with the raise of vernacular
literatures, the greatest changes appeared with the invention of the printing press in the
15th century and the growth of vernacular languages in political spheres: languages
were taken outside their own environment, thus promoting their translations. The
Renaissance period also brought along Etienne Dolets five principles of Translation
Theory, which are still valid today. The idea of a lingua franca was brought into life in
the 17th century when scientists needed to publish their work and did not know whether
to use their vernacular languages or Latin. During the same century, we have reviewed
John Drydens main translation methods (metaphrase, paraphrase and imitation) and his
preference to use paraphrasing because he saw it as a means to create another piece of
art, which was criticized by other authors such as Alexander Tytler. Other authors of
that time, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, gave way to the famous dichotomy
between foreignization and domestication (that will be discussed in chapter 3). Reader-
to-author and author-to-reader were other ideas put forward during the Romantic period.
The 19th century again gave rise to contrasting ideas such as the near impossibility of
creating good literary translations (Percy Bysshe Shelley) as opposed to new
nationalistic ideas during the Industrial Revolution times, which favored the production
of rather literal translations to be read by a minority of cultivated readers (Matthew
Arnold). The latter idea regarded the translator as a mere technician (not a poet or
commentator). The 20th century witnessed the consolidation and professionalism of
Translation Studies, starting with the view of translation as an art (Walter Benjamin)
and as a science (Eugene Nida), moving through great linguistic theories,
psycholinguistic views on translation, communicative and functional approaches, and
cultural studies, culminating with George Steiners idea of translation as an exact art.
Today, Translation Studies is considered an interdisciplinary and transversal science
that involves several other disciplines, whose origin dates back to James S. Holmes and
his so-called Holmess map, and the subsequent changes introduced by Gideon Toury.

Translators have always played a key role in society. Early medieval translators
contributed to the development of modern languages and national identities around
these languages. Translators went on playing a major role in the advancement of
society for centuries. After being regarded as scholars alongside authors,
researchers and scientists for two millennia, many translators have become
invisible in the 21st century. It is time to acknowledge again the translators’ major
impact on society
In Antiquity
The translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek in the 3rd century BCE is regarded as
the first major translation in the Western world. Most Jews had forgotten Hebrew, their
ancestral language, and needed the Bible to be available in Greek to be able to read it.
The translation of the Bible from Hebrew to Greek is known as the “Septuagint”, a
name that refers to the seventy scholars who were commissioned to translate the
Hebrew Bible in Alexandria, Egypt. Each translator worked in solitary confinement in
his own cell, and according to legend all seventy versions proved identical.
The translator’s role as a bridge for “carrying across” values between cultures has been
discussed since Terence, a Roman playwright who adapted Greek comedies in the 2nd
century BCE.
Cicero famously cautioned against translating “word for word” (“verbum pro verbo”) in
“On the Orator” (“De Oratore”, 55 BCE): “I did not think I ought to count them [the
words] out to the reader like coins, but to pay them by weight, as it were”. Cicero, a
statesman, orator, lawyer and philosopher, was also a translator from Greek to Latin,
and compared the translator to an artist.
The debate about sense-for-sense translation vs. word-for-word translation has been
ongoing for centuries. The coiner of the term “sense for sense” is said to be Jerome
(commonly known as St. Jerome) in his “Letter to Pammachius” (396). While
translating the Bible into Latin (a translation known as the “Vulgate”), Jerome stated
that the translator needed to translate “not word for word but sense for sense” (“non
verbum e verbo sed sensum de sensu”).
Kumārajīva, a Buddhist monk and scholar, was a prolific translator into Chinese of
Buddhist texts written in Sanskrit, a monumental work he carried out in the late 4th
century. His most famous work is the translation of the “Diamond Sutra”, an influential
Mahayana sutra in East Asia, that became an object of devotion and study in Zen
Buddhism. A later copy (dated 868) of the Chinese edition of “Diamond Sutra” is “the
earliest complete survival of a printed book”, according to the website of the British
Library (that owns the piece). Kumārajīva’s clear and straightforward translations
focused more on conveying the meaning than on precise literal rendering. They had a
deep influence on Chinese Buddhism, and are still more popular than later, more literal
translations.
The spread of Buddhism led to large-scale translation efforts spanning more than a
thousand years throughout Asia. Major works were sometimes translated in a rather
short time. The Tanguts for example took mere decades to translate works that had
taken the Chinese centuries to translate, with contemporary sources describing the
Emperor and his mother personally contributing to the translation, alongside sages of
various nationalities.
Large-scale translation efforts were also undertaken by the Arabs after they conquered
the Greek Empire, in order to offer Arabic versions of all major Greek philosophical
and scientific works.

In the Middle Ages

Latin was the lingua franca of the Western world throughout the Middle Ages. There
were few translations of Latin works into vernacular languages. In the 9th century,
Alfred the Great, King of Wessex in England, was far ahead of his time in
commissioning translations from Latin to English of two major works: Bede’s
“Ecclesiastical History of the English People”, and Boethius’ “The Consolation of
Philosophy”. These translations helped improve the underdeveloped English prose.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Toledo School of Translators became a meeting point
for European scholars who traveled and settled down in Toledo, Spain, to translate
major philosophical, religious, scientific and medical works from Arabic, Greek and
Hebrew into Latin.
Roger Bacon, a 13th-century English scholar, was the first to assess that a translator
should have a thorough knowledge of both the source language and the target language
to produce a good translation, and that he should also be well versed in the discipline of
the work he was translating.
The first “fine” translations into English were produced by Geoffrey Chaucer in the
14th century. Chaucer founded an English poetic tradition based on translations or
adaptations of literary works in Latin and French, two languages that were more
established than English at the time. The “finest” religious translation was the
“Wycliffe’s Bible” (1382-84), named after John Wycliffe, the English theologian who
translated the Bible from Latin to English.

In the 15th century

The trip of Byzantine scholar Gemistus Pletho to Florence, Italy, pioneered the revival
of Greek learning in Western Europe. Pletho reintroduced Plato’s thought during the
1438-39 Council of Florence, in a failed attempt to reconcile the East-West Schism (an
11th-century schism between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church).
During the Council, Pletho met Cosimo de Medici, the ruler of Florence and its patron
of learning and the arts, which led to the foundation of the Platonic Academy. Under the
leadership of Italian scholar and translator Marsilio Ficino, the Platonic Academy took
over the translation into Latin of all Plato’s works, Plotinus’ “Enneads” of Plotinus and
other Neoplatonist works. Ficino’s work — and Erasmus’ Latin edition of the New
Testament — led to a new attitude to translation. For the first time, readers demanded
rigour in rendering the exact words of Plato and Jesus (and Aristotle and others) as a
ground for their philosophical and religious beliefs.
A “fine” work of English prose was Thomas Malory’s “Le Morte d’Arthur” (1485), a
free translation of Arthurian romances on the legendary King Arthur and his literary
companions Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table. Malory
adapted existing French and English stories while adding original material, for example
the “Gareth” story as one of the stories of the Knights of the Round Table.

In the 16th century

Non-scholarly literature continued to rely heavily on adaptation. Tudor poets and
Elizabethan translators adapted themes by Horace, Ovid, Petrarch and other Latin
writers, while inventing a new poetic style. The poets and translators wanted to supply a
new audience — created from the rise of a middle class and the development of printing
— with “works such as the original authors would have written, had they been writing
in England in that day” (Wikipedia).
The “Tyndale New Testament” (1525) was regarded as the first great Tudor translation,
named after William Tyndale, the well-known scholar who was its main translator. For
the first time, the Bible was directly translated from Hebrew and Greek texts. After
translating the whole New Testament, Tyndale started translating the Old Testament,
and translated half of it. He also became a leading figure in Protestant Reformation
before being sentenced to death for the unlicensed possession of the Scripture in
English. After his death, one of his assistants completed the translation of the Old
Testament. The “Tyndale Bible” became the first mass-produced English translation of
the Bible on the printing press.
Martin Luther, a German professor of theology and a seminal figure in the Protestant
Reformation, translated the Bible into German in his later life (1522-34). Luther was the
first European scholar to assess that one translates satisfactorily only towards his own
language, a bold statement which became the norm two centuries later. The publication
of the “Luther Bible” contributed significantly to the development of the modern
German language.
Along with the “Luther Bible” in German (1522-34), two other major translations were
the “Jakub Wujek Bible” (“Biblia Jakuba Wujka”) in Polish (1535) and the “King
James Bible” in English (1604-11), with lasting effects on the languages and cultures of
the three countries. The “Luther Bible” also had lasting effects on religion. The
disparities in the translation of crucial words and passages contributed to some extent to
the split of Western Christianity into Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. The main
factor for the split was the Protestant Reformation’s goal to eliminate corruption in the
Roman Catholic Church.
During the same period, the Bible was also translated into Dutch, French, Spanish,
Czech and Slovene. The Dutch translation was published in 1526 by Jacob van Lisevelt.
The French translation was published in 1528 by Jacques Lefevre d’Étaples (Jacobus
Faber Stapulensis). The Spanish translation was published in 1569 by Casiodoro de
Reina. The Slovene translation was published in 1584 by Jurij Dalmatn. The Czech
translation was published in 1579-93. All these translations were a driving force in the
use of vernacular languages in Christian Europe, and contributed to the development of
modern European languages.
In the 17th century
Miguel de Cervantes, a Spanish novelist known all over Europe for his novel “Don
Quixote” (1605-15), expressed his own views on the translation process. According to
Cervantes, translations of his time — with the exception of those made from Greek to
Latin — were like looking at a Flemish tapestry by its reverse side. While the main
figures of a Flemish tapestry could be discerned, they were obscured by the loose
threads, and they lacked the clarity of the front side.
In the second half of the 17th century, English poet and translator John Dryden sought
to make Virgil speak “in words such as he would probably have written if he were
living as an Englishman”. Dryden also observed that “translation is a type of drawing
after life”, thus comparing the translator with an artist several centuries after Cicero.
Alexander Pope, a fellow poet and translator, was said to have reduced Homer’s “wild
paradise” to “order” while translating the Greek epic poems into English, but these
comments had no impact on his best-selling translations.
“Faithfulness” and “transparency” were better defined as dual ideals in translation,
while often being at odds. “Faithfulness” was the extent to which a translation
accurately renders the meaning of the source text, without distortion, by taking into
account the text itself (subject, type and use), its literary qualities, and its social or
historical context. “Transparency” was the extent to which the end result of a translation
stands as a text of its own that could have been originally been written in the language
of the reader, and conforms to its grammar, syntax and idiom. A “transparent”
translation is often qualified as “idiomatic” (source: Wikipedia).

In the 18th century

According to Johann Gottfried Herder, a German philosopher, theologian and poet, a
translator should translate towards (and not from) his own language, a statement already
expressed two centuries earlier by Martin Luther, who was the first European scholar to
assess that one translates satisfactorily only towards his own language.
But there was still not much concern for accuracy. “Throughout the 18th century, the
watchword of translators was ease of reading. Whatever they did not understand in a
text, or thought might bore readers, they omitted. They cheerfully assumed that their
own style of expression was the best, and that texts should be made to conform to it in
translation. Even for scholarship, except for the translation of the Bible, they cared no
more than had their predecessors, and did not shrink from making translations from
languages they hardly knew” (Wikipedia).
At the time, dictionaries and thesauri were not regarded as adequate guides for
translating into a foreign language. In his “Essay on the Principles of Translation”
(1791), Scottish historian Alexander Tytler emphasized that assiduous reading was
more helpful than the use of dictionaries. Polish poet and grammarian Onufry Andrzej
Kopczyński expressed the same views a few years earlier, in 1783, while adding the
need to listen to the spoken language.
Polish encyclopedist Ignacy Krasicki described the translator’s special role in society in
his posthumous essay “On Translating Books” (“O tłumaczeniu ksiąg”, 1803). Often
named Poland’s La Fontaine, Krasicki was a novelist, poet and fabulist, and a translator
from French and Greek to Polish. In his essay, he wrote that “translation is in fact an art
both estimable and very difficult, and therefore is not the labour 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.”

In the 19th century

There were new standards for accuracy and style. For accuracy, the policy became “the
text, the whole text, and nothing but the text (except for bawdy passages), with the
addition of extensive explanatory footnotes” (in J.M. Cohen, “Translation” entry in
“Encyclopedia Americana”, 1986, vol. 27). For style, the aim was to constantly remind
readers that they were reading a foreign classic.
An exception was the translation and adaptation of Persian poems by Edward
FitzGerald, and English writer and poet. His book “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám”
(1859) offered a selection of poems by Omar Khayyám, an 11th-century poet,
mathematician and astronomer. FitzGerald’s translation from Arabic to English actually
drew little of its material from the Persian poems, but it has stayed the most famous
translation of Khayyám’s poems to this day, despite more recent and accurate
translations.
The “non-transparent” translation theory was first developed by German theologian and
philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher, a major figure in German Romanticism. In his
seminal lecture “On the Different Methods of Translating” (1813), Schleiermacher
distinguished between translation methods that moved the writer towards the reader, i.e.
transparency, and those that moved the reader toward the author, i.e. an extreme fidelity
to the foreignness of the source text. Schleiermacher favoured the latter approach. His
distinction between “domestication” (bringing the author to the reader) and
“foreignization” (taking the reader to the author) inspired prominent theorists in the 20th
century, for example Antoine Berman and Lawrence Venuti.
Yan Fu, a Chinese scholar and translator, developed in 1898 his three-facet theory of
translation: faithfulness, i.e. be true to the original in spirit; expressiveness, i.e. be
accessible to the target reader; and elegance, i.e. be written in an “educated” language.
Yan Fu’s theory of translation was based on his experience with translating works in
social sciences from English to Chinese. Of the three facets, he considered the second as
the most important. If the meaning of the translated text was not accessible to the
reader, there was no difference between having translated the text and not having
translated the text at all. According to Yan Fu, in order to facilitate comprehension, the
word order could be changed, Chinese examples could replace English ones, and
people’s names could be rendered Chinese. His theory had much impact worldwide, but
was sometimes wrongly extended to the translation of literary works.

In the 20th century

Aniela Zagórska, a Polish translator, translated into Polish nearly all the works of her
uncle Joseph Conrad, a Polish-British novelist who wrote in English. In Conrad’s view,
translation, like other arts, involved choice, and choice implied interpretation. Conrad
would later advise his niece: “Don’t trouble to be too scrupulous. I may tell you that in
my opinion it is better to interpret than to translate. It is, then, a question of finding the
equivalent expressions. And there, my dear, I beg you to let yourself be guided more by
your temperament than by a strict conscience” (cited in Zdzisław Najder, “Joseph
Conrad: A Life”, 2007).
Jorge Luis Borges, a writer, essayist and poet living in Argentina, was also a notable
translator of literary works from English, French, German, Old English or Old Norse to
Spanish. He translated — while subtly transforming — the works of William Faulkner,
André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt
Whitman, Virginia Woolf, and others. Borges also wrote and lectured extensively on the
art of translation, holding that a translation may improve upon the original, may even be
unfaithful to it, and that alternative and potentially contradictory renderings of the same
work can be equally valid.
Other translators still consciously produced literal translations, especially translators of
religious, historical, academic and scientific works. They often adhered as closely as
possible to the source text, sometimes stretching the limits of the end language to
produce an non-idiomatic translation.
A new discipline named “Translation Studies” appeared in the second half of the 20th
century. The term “Translation Studies” was coined by James S. Holmes, a poet and
translator of poetry, in his seminal paper “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies”
(1972). While writing his own poetry, Holmes translated many works from Dutch and
Belgian poets into English. He was hired as a professor in the new Institute of
Interpreters and Translators (later renamed the Institute of Translation Studies) created
in 1964 by the University of Amsterdam.
Interpreting was only seen as a specialized form of translation — spoken translation
instead of written translation — before becoming a separate discipline in the mid-20th
century. Interpreting Studies gradually emancipated from Translation Studies to
concentrate on the practical and pedagogical aspect of interpreting. It also included
sociological studies of interpreters and their working conditions, while such studies are
still sorely lacking for translators to this day.

In the 21st century

Like their ancestors, contemporary translators contribute to the enrichment of “target”
languages (the languages they are translating into). When a target language lacks terms
that are present in a source language (the language they are translating from), they
borrow those terms, thereby enriching the target language with source-language calques
(literally translated words or phrases) and loanwords (words incorporated into another
language without translation).
Translation Studies have become an academic interdiscipline that includes many fields
of study (comparative literature, history, linguistics, philology, philosophy, semiotics,
terminology, computational linguistics). Students also choose a specialty (legal,
economic, technical, scientific or literary translation) in order to be trained accordingly.
The internet has fostered a worldwide market for translation and localization services,
and for translation software. It has also brought many issues, with precarious
employment and lower rates, and the rise of unpaid volunteer translation (including
crowdsourced translation) promoted by major organizations that have the necessary
funds to hire many professionals, but no professional translators. Bilingual people need
more skills than two languages to become good translators. To be a translator is a
profession, and implies a thorough knowledge of the subject matter.
After being regarded as scholars alongside authors, researchers and scientists for two
millennia, many translators have become invisible in the 21st century, with their names
often forgotten on the articles, books covers and websites they spent days, weeks or
months to translate.
Despite the omnipresent MT (machine translation) and CAT (computer-assisted
translation) tools created to speed up the translation process, some translators still want
to be compared to artists, not only for their precarious life, but also for the craft,
knowledge, dedication and passion they put into their work.