TRANSLATION THEORY BEFORE THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Up until the second half of the twentieth century,

western translation theory seemed
locked in what George Steiner (1998: 319) calls a
‘sterile’ debate over the ‘triad’ of ‘literal’,
‘free’ and ‘faithful’ translation. The distinction
between ‘word-for-word’ (i.e. ‘literal’)
and ‘sense-for-sense’ (i.e. ‘free’) translation goes
back to Cicero (first century BCE) and
St Jerome (late fourth century CE) and forms the
basis of key writings on translation in
centuries nearer to our own.
 Cicero outlined his approach to translation in De optimo genere oratorum (46 BCE/
1960 CE), introducing his own translation of the speeches of the Attic orators Aeschines and
Demosthenes:

 And I did not translate them as an

interpreter, but as an orator, keeping the
same ideas and forms, or as one might
say, the ‘figures’ of thought, but in
language which conforms to our usage.
And in so doing, I did not hold it
necessary to render word for word, but I
preserved the general style and force of
the language.
The ‘word-for-word’ (‘literal’) vs. ‘sense-
for-sense’ (‘free’) debate.
 The ‘interpreter’ of the first line is the literal
(‘word-for-word’) translator, while the
 ‘orator’ tried to produce a speech that moved
the listeners. In Roman times, ‘word-for-word
translation was exactly what it said: the
replacement of each individual word of the ST
 (invariably Greek) with its closest grammatical
equivalent in Latin.
 Sense-for-sense approach
 In a short but famous passage from his Ars
Poetica (20 BCE?),2 underlines the goal
of producing an aesthetically pleasing an creative
text in the TL, had great influence on
the succeeding centuries.
 St Jerome, the most famous of all translators,

cites the authority of Cicero’s approach to

justify his own Latin revision and translation of
the Christian Bible.
 St.Jerome
 Now I not only admit but freely announce that in translating from the Greek – except of
course in the case of the Holy Scripture, where even the syntax contains a mystery –
I render not word-for-word, but sense-for-sense. (St Jerome 395 CE/1997: 25)

St Jerome bound up with the translation of the Bible and other religious and
philosophical texts.
Although some scholars (e.g. Lambert 1991: 7) argue that these terms have been
misinterpreted, Jerome’s statement is now usually taken to refer to what came to be
known as ‘literal’ (word-for-word) and ‘free’ (sense-for-sense) translation.

Jerome rejected the word-for-word approach because, by following so closely the form of
the ST, it produced an absurd translation, cloaking the sense of the original. The sense-for-
sense approach, on the other hand, allowed the sense or content of the ST to be translated.
In these poles can be seen the origin of both the ‘literal vs. free’ and ‘form vs. content’
debate that has continued until modern times.
As far as the Bible was concerned, however, the preoccupation of the Roman
Catholic Church was for the ‘correct’ established meaning of the Bible to be
protected.

 Any translation diverging from the accepted interpretation was likely to be deemed heretical
and to be censured or banned. An even worse fate lay in store for some of the translators. The
most famous examples are those of the English theologian-translator William Tyndale and the
French humanist Etienne Dolet, both burnt at the stake.
Tyndale, a formidable linguist who was said to have mastered ten languages, including Hebrew,
and whose extraordinary English Bible was later used as the basis for the King James Version,
was abducted, tried for heresy and executed in the Netherlands in 1536
(Bobrick 2003, Chapter 2).

Dolet was condemned by the theological faculty of Sorbonne in 1546, apparently for adding, in
his translation of one of Plato’s dialogues, the phrase rien du tout (‘nothing at all’) in a
passage about what existed after death. The addition led to the charge of blasphemy, the
assertion being that Dolet did not believe in immortality. For such a translation ‘error’ he was
executed.
 Martin Luther played a pivotal role in the Reformation.

 But advances in the study and knowledge of the Biblical

languages and classical scholarship, typified by Erasmus’s
edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516 and the
general climate of the Reformation and spurred by the
new technology of the printing press, led to a revolution
in Bible translation practice which ‘dominated sixteenth-
century book production’ in Europe (Bobrick 2003: 81).
Non-literal or non-accepted translation came to be seen
and used as a weapon against the Church. The most
notable example is Martin Luther’s crucially influential
translation into East Central German of the New
Testament(1522) and later the Old Testament (1534).
Luther follows St Jerome in rejecting a word-for-word translation
strategy since it
would be unable to convey the same meaning as the ST and would
sometimes be
incomprehensible.

-While Luther’s treatment of the free and literal

debate does not show any real advance on
what St Jerome had written 1,100 years before,
his infusion of the Bible with the language of
ordinary people and his consideration of
translation in terms focusing on the TL and the
TT reader were crucial.
 Martin Luther

 Luther had been heavily criticized by the

Church for the addition of the word allein
(‘alone/ only’), because there was no
equivalent Latin word (e.g. sola) in the ST. The
charge was that the German implies that the
individual’s belief is sufficient for a good life,
making ‘the work of the law’ (i.e. religious law)
redundant. Luther counters by saying that he
was translatinginto ‘pure, clear German’,
where allein would be used for emphasis.
From that time onwards, the language of the ordinary German speaks clear and
strong,

thanks to Luther’s translation .

Typical of this is his famous quote extolling the
language of the people:
You must ask the mother at home, the children
in the street, the ordinary man in the
market and look at their mouths, how they
speak, and translate that way; then they’ll
understand and see that you’re speaking to
them in German.
 EARLY ATTEMPTS to TRANSLATION THEORIES

 England of the seventeenth century – with

Denham, Cowley and Dryden – marked an
important step forward in translation theory
with ‘deliberate, reasoned statements,
unmistakable in their purpose and meaning’.
At that time, translation into English was
almost exclusively confined to verse renderings
of Greek and Latin classics.
 Cowley, for instance, in his preface to Pindaric
Odes (1640), attacks poetry that is ‘converted faithfully and word for
word into French or
Italian prose’

 His approach is also to counter the inevitable loss

of beauty in translation by using ‘our wit or
invention’ to create new beauty. In doing this,
Cowley admits he has ‘taken, left out and added
what I please’ to the Odes (Amos, p. 150). Cowley
even proposes the term imitation for this very
free method of translating. The idea was not, as in
the Roman period, that such a free method would
enable the translator to surpass the original;
rather that this was the method that permitted the
‘spirit’ of the ST to be best reproduced.
 Such a very free approach to translation produced a reaction, notably from
another
English poet and translator, John Dryden, whose brief description of the
translation
process would have enormous impact on subsequent translation theory and
practice.

 In the preface to his translation of Ovid’s Epistles in 1680, Dryden

(1680/1992: 17) reduces
all translation to three categories:

 (1)‘metaphrase’: ‘word by word and line by line’ translation,

which corresponds to literal translation;
 (2) ‘paraphrase’: ‘translation with latitude, where the author is
kept in view by the translator, so as never to be lost, but his words
are not so strictly followed as his sense’; this involves changing
whole phrases and more or less corresponds to faithful or sense-for-
sense translation;
 (3) ‘imitation’: ‘forsaking’ both words and sense; this corresponds
to Cowley’s very free translation and is more or less adaptation.