| Thursday, July 22, 2010

I can’t quite remember why now but on Sunday I ended up reading about some historically very important translators. Who would you consider to be the most important translators in history?

I would suggest the early Bible translators. Here are five literary, religious and historical heavyweights I read about on Sunday. Feel free to suggest more in the comments.

Compared to the warp-speed translation demands placed on most professional translators today, I suspect you will be surprised at how long they took to do their work.

It appears that none of the following translators translated the whole thing themselves, although they did large parts of each version and coordinated the rest—medieval- and renaissance–era translation project management!

• Jerome : patron saint of translators, formerly Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus. Born in the lost Roman town of Stridon (near the modern Ljubljana, in Slovenia) he was responsible for producing the version of the Bible known as the Latin Vulgate—which would become the standard Latin text for the Roman Catholic Church—starting in the year 382, when he was 35. He began his translation by spending eight years revising the existing Latin version of the New Testament—known as the Vetus Latina—for mistakes. He then spent a further 15 years translating the old testament directly from Hebrew, instead of the previously more frequent option of producing a Latin version from the Septuagint—the Koine Greek version of the Hebrew Bible.
• Guyart des Moulins : born in 1251, des Moulins was the author of the first French bible—la Bible Historiale—produced by 1294 from Jerome’s Vulgate.
• John Wycliffe : born in 1324, Wycliffe was an English Roman Catholic rebel who—along with his followers the Lollards—translated Jerome’s Vulgate into vernacular English. Wyclif’s Bible was a group of translations which appeared in Middle English between 1382 and 1395. As you can see, his efforts and movement predated Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation by more than a century.
• Desiderius Erasmus : the man to whom tens of thousands of European students must give their thanks for their year-long jaunts around Europe to ‘study’, and also a translator of Bibles. Born in Rotterdam in 1466, he was inspired 33 years later by a visit to England and the teaching of John Colet to learn Greek, study theology and prepare a new edition of Jerome’s Vulgate. “My mind is so excited at the thought of emending Jerome’s text, with notes, that I seem to myself inspired by some god. I have already almost finished emending him by collating a large number of ancient manuscripts, and this I am doing at enormous personal expense.”
• Martin Luther : “The task of translating the Bible which he thus assumed was to absorb him until the end of his life.”While he was sequestered in the Wartburg Castle (1521–1522) Luther began to translate the New Testament into German in order to make it more accessible to all the people of the “Holy Roman Empire of the German nation.” He used Erasmus’ second edition (1519) of the Greek New Testament—Erasmus’ Greek text would come to be known as the Textus Receptus. To help him in translating Luther would make forays into the nearby towns and markets to listen to people speak. He wanted to ensure their comprehension by a translation closest to their contemporary language usage.”
• William Tyndale : Born around 1490, “Tyndale’s (translation) was the first English translation to draw directly from Hebrew and Greek texts, and the first to take advantage of the new medium of print, which allowed for its wide distribution.” As well as being responsible for 75% of the King James Bible, Tyndale scholar David Daniell sums up Tyndale’s influence on the English language: “No Tyndale, no Shakespeare.”
• Casiodoro de Reina : the first complete version of the Bible in Spanish is known as the Reina–Valera translation, produced by Casiodoro de Reina, who was attracted to the Prostestant Reformation and Calvin. “While in exile, variously in London, Antwerp, Frankfurt, Orléans and Bergerac, funded by various sources (such as Juan Pérez de Pineda) he began translating the Bible into Spanish, using a number of works as source texts. For the Old Testament, the work appears to have made extensive use of the Ferrara Bible in Ladino with comparisons to the Masoretic Text and the Vetus Latina. The New Testament derives from the Textus Receptus of Erasmus with comparisons to the Vetus Latina and Syriac manuscripts.”