Translation

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.

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.

"[26] Chinese characters, in avoiding grammatical specificity, offer advantages to poets (and, simultaneously, challenges to poetry translators) that are associated primarily with absences of subject, number, and tense.

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 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.

)[28]A translator who contributed mightily to the advance of the Islamic Enlightenment was the Egyptian cleric Rifaa al-Tahtawi (1801–73), who had spent five years in Paris in the late 1820s, teaching religion to Muslim students.

After returning to Cairo with the encouragement of Muhammad Ali (1769–1849), the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, al–Tahtawi became head of the new school of languages and embarked on an intellectual revolution by initiating a program to translate some two thousand European and Turkish volumes, ranging from ancient texts on geography and geometry to Voltaire's biography of Peter the Great, along with the Marseillaise and the entire Code Napoléon.

[30]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.

"[B]oth illiberal currents of the modern Middle East," writes de Bellaigue, "Islamism and militarism, received a major impetus from Western empire-builders."

A language is not merely a collection of words and of rules of grammar and syntax for generating sentences, but also a vast interconnecting system of connotations and cultural references whose mastery, writes linguist Mario Pei, "comes close to being a lifetime job.

"[63] The complexity of the translator's task cannot be overstated; one author suggests that becoming an accomplished translator—after having already acquired a good basic knowledge of both languages and cultures—may require a minimum of ten years' experience.

[16] Michael Wood, a Princeton University emeritus professor, writes: "[T]ranslation, like language itself, involves contexts, conventions, class, irony, posture and many other regions where speech acts hang out.

"[79] Christopher Kasparek also cautions that competent translation – analogously to the dictum, in mathematics, of Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems – generally requires more information about the subject matter than is present in the actual source text.

Relying exclusively on unedited machine translation, however, ignores the fact that communication in human language is context-embedded and that it takes a person to comprehend the context of the original text with a reasonable degree of probability.

Other writers, among many who have made a name for themselves as literary translators, include Vasily Zhukovsky, Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Stiller, Lydia Davis, Haruki Murakami, Achy Obejas, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

The 9th-century Alfred the Great, king of Wessex in England, was far ahead of his time in commissioning vernacular Anglo-Saxon translations of Bede's Ecclesiastical History and Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy.

[111] Meanwhile, in Renaissance Italy, a new period in the history of translation had opened in Florence with the arrival, at the court of Cosimo de' Medici, of the Byzantine scholar Georgius Gemistus Pletho shortly before the fall of Constantinople to the Turks (1453).

France's Pléiade, England's Tudor poets, and the Elizabethan translators adapted themes by Horace, Ovid, Petrarch and modern Latin writers, forming a new poetic style on those models.

The English poets and translators sought to supply a new public, created by 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.

In his 1997 book Le Ton beau de Marot, Douglas Hofstadter argued that a good translation of a poem must convey as much as possible not only of its literal meaning but also of its form and structure (meter, rhyme or alliteration scheme, etc.).

However, a number of more contemporary literary translators of poetry lean toward Alexander von Humboldt's notion of language as a "third universe" existing "midway between the phenomenal reality of the 'empirical world' and the internalized structures of consciousness.

"[117] Perhaps this is what poet Sholeh Wolpé, translator of the 12th-century Iranian epic poem The Conference of the Birds, means when she writes: Twelfth-century Persian and contemporary English are as different as sky and sea.

[118]Poet Sherod Santos writes: "The task is not to reproduce the content, but with the flint and the steel of one's own language to spark what Robert Lowell has called 'the fire and finish of the original.

Translating this work requires a high knowledge of the genres presented in the book, such as poetic forms, various prose types including memorials, letters, proclamations, praise poems, edicts, and historical, philosophical and political disquisitions, threnodies and laments for the dead, and examination essays.

The most familiar types are translations presented as subtitles or surtitles projected during opera performances, those inserted into concert programs, and those that accompany commercial audio CDs of vocal music.

For example, Isaiah's prophecy announcing that the Savior will be born of a virgin, uses the word 'almah, which is also used to describe the dancing girls at Solomon's court, and simply means young and nubile.

'"[133] In 863 CE the brothers Saints Cyril and Methodius, the Byzantine Empire's "Apostles to the Slavs", began translating parts of the Bible into the Old Church Slavonic language, using the Glagolitic script that they had devised, based on the Greek alphabet.

Acker's Postmodern fiction both fragments and preserves the materiality of Catullus’s Latin text in ways that tease out its semantics and syntax without wholly appropriating them, a method that unsettles the notion of any fixed and finished translation.

[152] A survey questionnaire consists of a list of questions and answer categories aimed at extracting data from a particular group of people about their attitude, behavior, or knowledge.