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Ciceron
The first testimonies of the translation come from Ciceron; He rejects word-for-word or literal translation. Outlined his approach to translation in De optimo genere oratorum, introducing his own translation from the Greek of speeches of the fourth-century Ac Attic orators Aeschines and Demosthenes: -
400
St Jerome
He is considered the founder of translation theory; His approach to translating the Greek Septuagint Bible into Latin would affect later translations of the Scriptures. the most famous of all western translators, cites the authority of Cicero’s approach to justify his own Latin revision and translation of the Christian Bible, -
1483
Luther
He is consider the greatest exponent of new trends; was the first to translate the Bible from Greek and Hebrew to Aleman. Luther played a pivotal role in the Reformation while, linguistically, his use of a regional yet socially broad dialect went a long way to reinforcing that variety of the German language as standard -
1490
Tyndale
He was a formidable linguist who was said to have mastered ten languages, including Hebrew. His extraordinary English Bible, produced in exile, was later used as the basis for the Geneva Bible (1560) and King James version (1611). -
1509
Dolet
His objective was to disseminate Classical teachings through a Humanist lens and to contribute to the development of the French language. -
The theory of language
Was proposed by the famous Swiss linguist Saussure (1857–1913)
Saussure distinguished between the linguistic system (langue) and specific individual utterances (parole). Central to his theory of langue, he differentiated between the ‘signifier’ (the spoken and written signal) and the ‘signified’ (the concept), which together create the linguistic ‘sign’ -
The theory of a universal generative–transformational grammar
Chomsky’s generative–transformational model analyses sentences into a series of related levels governed by rules. In very simplified form, the key features of this model can be summarized as follows: Phrase-structure rules generate an underlying or deep structure which is transformed by transformational rules relating one underlying structure to another (e.g. active to passive), to produce a final surface structure, which itself is subject to phonological and
morphemic rules. -
Eugene Nida’s theory of translation
Nida’s theory took concrete form in two major works in the 1960s: Toward a Science of Translating (Nida 1964a) and the co-authored The Theory and Practice of Translation (Nida and Taber 1969). The title of the first book is significant; Nida attempts to move Bible translation into a more scientific era by incorporating recent work in linguistics. -
A Linguistic Theory of Translation
Translation shifts are linguistic changes occurring in translation of ST to TT. The term itself seems to originate in Catford’s A Linguistic Theory of Translation, where he devotes a chapter to the subject. Catford (1965:20) follows the Firthian and Hallidayan linguistic model, which analyses language as communication, operating functionally in context and on a range of different levels (e.g. phonology, graphology, grammar, lexis) and ranks (sentence, clause, group, word, morpheme, etc.) -
Skopos theory
Skopos is the Greek word for ‘aim’ or ‘purpose’ and was introduced into translation theory in the 1970s by Hans J. Vermeer (1930-2010) as a technical term for the purpose of a translation and of the action of translating. -
Polysystem theory
Was developed in the 1970s by the Israeli scholar Itamar Even-Zohar borrowing ideas from the Russian Formalists of the 1920s and the Czech Structuralists of the 1930s and 1940s on the other hand, EvenZohar it defines as: a multiple system, a system of various systems which intersect with each other and partly overlap, using concurrently different options, yet functioning as one structured whole, whose members are interdependent. -
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Postcolonialism translation
Postcolonialism is generally used to cover studies of the history of the former colonies, studies of powerful European empires, resistance to the colonialist powers and, more broadly, studies of the effect of the imbalance of power relations between colonized and colonizer. -
Translation studies
The study of translation as an academic subject only really began in the second half of the twentieth century; The Dutch-based US
scholar James S. Holmes (1924–1986) describes the then nascent discipline as being concerned with ‘the complex of problems clustered round the phenomenon of translating and translations’. -
Hermeneutic of translation
Steiner (1975/1998: 249) defines the hermeneutic approach as ‘the investigation of what it means to “understand” a piece of oral or written speech, and the attempt to diagnose this process in terms of a general model of meaning’. -
Actor-network theory.
In translation studies, the theory has been applied to the translation of poetry (Jones 2011) amongst others. A third approach draws on the social systems work of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann and features strongly in the work of Hermans (2007) and Tyulenev (2012). In contrast to Latour, Luhmann views society as a complex of closed functional systems that operate beyond the immediate influence of humans. -
Translatorial action theory
The translatorial action model proposed by Justa Holz-Mänttäri (Translatorisches Handeln: Theorie und Methode) takes up concepts from communication theory and action theory. Her aim, among others, was to provide a model and produce guidelines that can be applied to a wide range of professional translation situations. Translatorial action views translation as purpose-driven, outcome-oriented human interaction. It construes the process of translation as ‘message-transmitter compounds. -
Relevance theory
From the perspective of relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995), the important work of Ernst-August Gutt (1991/2000) claims translation is an example of a communication based around a cause-and-effect model of inferencing and interpretation; Any successful communication is said to depend on the communicator’s ensuring that his/her ‘informative intention’ is grasped by the receiver. -
Postcolonial translation theory
Spivak’s work is indicative of how cultural studies, and especially postcolonialism, has focused on issues of translation, the transnational and colonization. The central intersection of translation studies and postcolonial theory is that of power relations. -
Reception theory
One way of examining the reception is by looking at the reviews of a work, since they represent a ‘body of reactions’ to the author and the text (Brown 1994: 7) and form part of the sub-area of translation criticism in Holmes’s ‘map’ (see Chapter 1). Reviews are also a useful source of information concerning that culture’s view of translation itself. -
Translation and gender
Sherry Simon sees a language of sexism in translation studies, with its images of dominance, fidelity, faithfulness and betrayal. Feminist theorists also see a parallel between the status of translation, which is often considered to be derivative and inferior to original writing, and that of women, so often repressed in society and literature.
