TRANSLATION STUDIES

1. ANGELICA VIVEROS CRUZ

2. 
 Writings on the subject of translating go far back in
recorded history.
 The practice of translation was crucial for the early
dissemination of key cultural and religious texts and
concepts.
 the different ways of translating were discussed by,
among others, Cicero and Horace (first century BCE)
and St Jerome (fourth century CE), their writings were
to exert an important influence up until the twentieth
century.

3. • His approach to translating the Greek Septuagint Bible
into Latin would affect later translations of the Scriptures.
• In western Europe the translation of the Bible was to be
the battleground of conflicting ideologies for well over a
thou-sand years and especially during the Reformation in
the sixteenth century.
• In China, it was the translation of the Buddhist sutras that
inaugurated a long discus-sion on translation practice
from the first century CE .
St Jerome’s

4.  St. Jerome’s suggestions about how to render
translation can be considered another example of
Source-oriented theories:
 St. Jerome already stated that Bible translations
must respect the exact form of the source text
because God’s word must not be tampered with
whereas in secular texts the translator should strive
to render the meaning of the source text.

5. 
 In the last 34 years of his life, Jerome wrote the bulk
of his work. In addition to tracts on monastic life and
defenses of (and attacks on) theological practices, he
wrote some history, a few biographies, and many
biblical exegeses.
 Jerome also translated books of the Old Testament
into Latin. While the amount of work he did was
considerable, Jerome didn't manage to make
a complete translation of the Bible into Latin;
however, his work formed the core of what would
become, eventually, the accepted Latin translation
known as The Vulgate
ST. JEROME AND THE
BIBLE

6. 
 The version of the Bible used by the Roman Catholic
church for over a millennia and a half, the Vulgate is
a Latin translation of the original bible texts, created
mainly by St. Jerome during the end of the third and
start of the fourth centuries CE. Vulgate derives from
the phrase versio vulgata, or common translation.
THE VULGATE

7.  the study of the field developed into an academic
discipline only in the latter part of the twentieth century.
Before that, translation had often been relegated to an
element of language learning.
 In fact, from the late eighteenth century to the 1960s and
beyond, language learning in secondary schools in many
countries had come to be dominated by what was known
as grammar-translation.
 This is an approach that persists even today in certain
contexts. Typical of this is the following rather bizarre and
decontextualized collection of sentences to translate into
Spanish, for the prac-tice of Spanish tense use.
GRAMMAR
TRANSLATION

8. 
 Grammar-translation therefore fell into increasing
disrepute, particularly in many English-language
countries, with the rise of alternative forms of language
teaching such as the direct method and the
communicative approach from the 1960s and 1970s.
 The communicative approach stressed students’ natural
capacity to learn language and attempts to replicate
‘authentic’ language-learning conditions in the classroom.
It often privileged spoken over written forms, at least
initially, and generally avoided use of the students’ mother
tongue.
DIRECT METHOD AND
THE COMMUNCATIVE
APPROACH

9. 
 In 1960s USA, starting in Iowa and Princeton, literary
translation was promoted by the translation
workshop concept.
 The translation workshops were intended as a
platform for the introduction of new translations into
the target culture and for the discussion of the finer
principles of the translation process and of
understanding a text.
TRANSLATION
WORKSHOP

10.  literature is studied and compared transnationally
and transculturally, necessitating the reading of some
works in translation.
 Students and instructors in the field, usually called
"comparatists," have traditionally been proficient in
several languages and acquainted with the literary
traditions, literary criticism, and major literary texts of
those languages.
COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE

11. 
 Contrastive linguistics is a practice-oriented linguistic
approach that seeks to describe the differences and
similarities between a pair of languages (hence it is
occasionally called "differential linguistics").
 Contrastive descriptions can occur at every level of
linguistic structure: speech sounds (phonology),
written symbols (graphology), word-formation
(morphology), word meaning (lexicology), collocation
(phraseology), sentence structure (syntax) and
complete discourse (textology).
CONTRASTIVE
LINGUISTICS

12. 
 The more systematic, linguistic-oriented, approach to
the study of translation began to emerge in the
1950s and 1960s. There are a number of now classic
examples:
STUDY OF
TRANSLATION

13. 
Alfred Malblanc (1944/1963) had done
the same for translation between
French and German
Georges Mounin’s Les problèmes
théoriques de la traduction (1963)
exam-ined linguistic issues of
translation
Eugene Nida (1964a) incorporated
elements of Chomsky’s then
fashionable generative grammar as a
theoretical underpinning of his books,
which were initially designed to be
practical manuals for Bible translators.

14. 
 This more systematic approach began to mark out
the territory of the ‘scientific’ investigation of
translation.
 The word science was used by Nida in the title of his
1964 book ( Toward a Science of Translating,
1964a).