Actividad 1.3 ¿Cómo se hace una traducción?

Instrucciones:

Siguiendo los “pasos para sistematizar el trabajo en traducción” que viene en la

presentación Panorama Histórico de la Reflexión Traductológica, traduce el siguiente
fragmento de Translators Through History:

Translators and the invention of alphabets

Human beings have been living and dying for some four million years, but they have been

writing for fewer than six thousand. The earliest form of writing, Sumerian cuneiform script,

was born humbly in Mesopotamia to facilitate agricultural and commercial bookkeeping.

Other systems soon appeared in Egypt and China. Wherever writing existed, it was

regarded as a divine gift and became the exclusive privilege of an elite or a powerful

aristocratic class. In Egyptian mythology, for example, the invention of writing is attributed

to Thoth, the god of knowledge, language and magic, who served as adviser and scribe to

the other gods. The word “hieroglyphics”, in fact, means “sacred inscriptions”. With writing,

history was born. Translation, too. Archaeologists have uncovered Sumerian-Eblaite

vocabularies inscribed in clay tablets that are 4,500 years old.1 These bilingual lists attest

to the existence of translation even in remotest history. Writing quickly became the

preferred medium for commercial contracts, religious teachings, law and literature. In

ancient civilizations, scribes were the masters of writing, teaching and translation. They

performed most administrative functions and controlled both the sacred and secular

sciences. There is no doubt that they played a role in the invention of writing, but their

names have been erased with the passage of time.