Translation Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! ===Other traditions=== Due to [[Western colonialism]] and cultural dominance in recent centuries, Western translation traditions have largely replaced other traditions. The [[American Tradition Partnership|Western traditions]] draw on both ancient and medieval traditions, and on more recent European innovations. 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. Also, though heavily influenced by Western traditions and practiced by translators taught in Western-style educational systems, Chinese and related translation traditions retain some theories and philosophies unique to the Chinese tradition. ==== Near East ==== {{Expand section|date=March 2012}} Traditions of translating material among the languages of ancient [[Egypt]], [[Mesopotamia]], [[Assyria]] ([[Syriac language]]), [[Anatolia]], and [[Israel]] ([[Hebrew language]]) go back several millennia. There exist partial translations of the Sumerian ''[[Epic of Gilgamesh]]'' ({{circa|2000 BCE}}) into [[Southwest Asia]]n languages of the second millennium BCE.<ref>J.M. Cohen, "Translation", ''[[Encyclopedia Americana]]'', 1986, vol. 27, p. 12.</ref> An early example of a [[bilingual]] document is the 1274 BCE [[Treaty of Kadesh]] between the [[ancient Egypt]]ian and [[Hittite Empire|Hittie empire]]s. The [[Babylonia]]ns were the first to establish translation as a profession.<ref>Bakir, K.H. 1984. Arabization of Higher Education in Iraq. PhD thesis, University of Bath.</ref> The first translations of Greek and Coptic texts into Arabic, possibly indirectly from Syriac translations,<ref>Wakim, K.G. 1944. Arabic Medicine in Literature. Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 32 (1), January: 96-104.</ref> seem to have been undertaken as early as the late seventh century CE.<ref>Hitti, P.K. 1970. History of the Arabs from the Earliest Times to the Present. 10th ed. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.</ref> The second Abbasid Caliph funded a translation bureau in Baghdad in the eighth century.<ref>Monastra, Y., and W. J. Kopycki. 2009. Libraries. In: The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World. edited by J.L. Esposito, 2nd ed., vol.3, 424-427. New York: Oxford University Press.</ref> Bayt al-Hikma, the famous library in Baghdad, was generously endowed and the collection included books in many languages, and it became a leading centre for the translation of works from antiquity into Arabic, with its own Translation Department.<ref>Hussain, S.V. 1960. Organization and Administration of Muslim Libraries: From 786 A.D. to 1492 A.D. Quarterly Journal of the Pakistan Library Association 1 (1), July: 8-11.</ref> Translations into European languages from Arabic versions of lost Greek and Roman texts began in the middle of the eleventh century, when the benefits to be gained from the Arabs’ knowledge of the classical texts were recognised by European scholars, particularly after the establishment of the Escuela de Traductores de Toledo in Spain. [[William Caxton]]’s ''Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres'' (Sayings of the Philosophers, 1477) was a translation into English of an eleventh-century Egyptian text which reached English via translation into Latin and then French. The translation of foreign works for publishing in Arabic was revived by the establishment of the [[Madrasat al-Alsun]] (School of Tongues) in Egypt in 1813.<ref>S.A. El Gabri, ''The Arab Experiment in Translation'', New Delhi, India, Bookman’s Club, 1984.</ref> ====Asia==== {{Further|Chinese translation theory}} [[File:Jingangjing.jpg|thumb|upright=1.0|[[Buddhism|Buddhist]] ''[[Diamond Sutra]]'', translated into [[Chinese language|Chinese]] by [[Kumārajīva]] – world's oldest known dated printed book (868 CE)]] There is a separate tradition of translation in [[South Asia|South]], [[Southeast Asia|Southeast]] and [[East Asia]] (primarily of texts from the [[India]]n and [[China|Chinese]] civilizations), connected especially with the rendering of religious, particularly [[Buddhism|Buddhist]], texts and with the governance of the Chinese empire. Classical Indian translation is characterized by loose adaptation, rather than the closer translation more commonly found in Europe; and [[Chinese translation theory]] identifies various criteria and limitations in translation. In the East Asian sphere of Chinese cultural influence, more important than translation ''per se'' has been the use and reading of Chinese texts, which also had substantial influence on the Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages, with substantial [[Sino-Xenic vocabularies|borrowings of Chinese vocabulary]] and writing system. Notable is the Japanese [[kanbun]], a system for [[Gloss (annotation)|glossing]] Chinese texts for Japanese speakers. Though Indianized states in Southeast Asia often translated [[Sanskrit]] material into the local languages, the literate elites and scribes more commonly used Sanskrit as their primary language of culture and government. [[File:VOA Perry Link.jpg|thumb|[[Perry Link]]]] Some special aspects of translating from [[Chinese language|Chinese]] are illustrated in [[Perry Link]]'s discussion of translating the work of the [[Tang dynasty]] poet [[Wang Wei (Tang dynasty)|Wang Wei]] (699–759 CE).<ref>[[Perry Link]], "A Magician of Chinese Poetry" (review of [[Eliot Weinberger]], with an afterword by [[Octavio Paz]], ''19 Ways of Looking at [[Wang Wei (Tang dynasty)|Wang Wei]] (with More Ways)'', New Directions; and [[Eliot Weinberger]], ''The Ghosts of Birds'', New Directions), ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'', vol. LXIII, no. 18 (24 November 2016), pp. 49–50.</ref> {{blockquote|Some of the art of classical [[Chinese poetry]] [writes Link] must simply be set aside as [[untranslatability|untranslatable]]. The internal structure of [[Chinese characters]] has a beauty of its own, and the [[calligraphy]] in which classical poems were written is another important but untranslatable dimension. Since Chinese characters do not vary in length, and because there are exactly five characters per line in a poem like [the one that [[Eliot Weinberger]] discusses in ''19 Ways of Looking at [[Wang Wei (Tang dynasty)|Wang Wei]] (with More Ways)''], another untranslatable feature is that the written result, hung on a wall, presents a rectangle. 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. Chinese characters are pronounced in one syllable apiece, so producing such rhythms in Chinese is not hard and the results are unobtrusive; but any imitation in a Western language is almost inevitably stilted and distracting. Even less translatable are the patterns of [[Tone (linguistics)|tone]] arrangement in classical Chinese poetry. Each syllable (character) belongs to one of two categories determined by the [[pitch contour]] in which it is read; in a classical Chinese poem the patterns of alternation of the two categories exhibit [[Parallelism (grammar)|parallelism]] and mirroring.<ref name="LXIII 2016 p. 49">[[Perry Link]], "A Magician of Chinese Poetry", ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'', vol. LXIII, no. 18 (November 24, 2016), p. 49.</ref>}} Once the untranslatables have been set aside, the problems for a translator, especially of Chinese poetry, are two: What does the translator think the poetic line says? And once he thinks he understands it, how can he render it into the target language? Most of the difficulties, according to Link, arise in addressing the second problem, "where the impossibility of perfect answers spawns endless debate." Almost always at the center is the letter-versus-spirit [[dilemma]]. At the literalist extreme, efforts are made to dissect every conceivable detail about the language of the original Chinese poem. "The dissection, though," writes Link, "normally does to the art of a poem approximately what the [[scalpel]] of an [[anatomy]] instructor does to the life of a frog."<ref name="LXIII 2016 p. 49"/> Chinese characters, in avoiding [[grammar|grammatical]] specificity, offer advantages to poets (and, simultaneously, challenges to poetry translators) that are associated primarily with absences of [[Subject (grammar)|subject]], [[Grammatical number|number]], and [[Grammatical tense|tense]].<ref name="LXIII 2016 p. 50">[[Perry Link]], "A Magician of Chinese Poetry", ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'', vol. LXIII, no. 18 (24 November 2016), p. 50.</ref> It is the norm in classical [[Chinese poetry]], and common even in modern Chinese prose, to omit subjects; the reader or listener infers a subject. The grammars of some Western languages, however, require that a subject be stated (although this is often avoided by using a passive or impersonal construction). Most of the translators cited in Eliot Weinberger's ''19 Ways of Looking at [[Wang Wei (Tang dynasty)|Wang Wei]]'' supply a subject. Weinberger points out, however, that when an "I" as a subject is inserted, a "controlling individual mind of the poet" enters and destroys the effect of the Chinese line. Without a subject, he writes, "the experience becomes both universal and immediate to the reader." Another approach to the subjectlessness is to use the target language's [[passive voice]]; but this again particularizes the experience too much.<ref name="LXIII 2016 p. 50"/> [[Noun]]s have no [[Grammatical number|number]] in Chinese. "If," writes Link, "you want to talk in Chinese about one rose, you may, but then you use a "[[measure word]]" to say "one blossom-of roseness."<ref name="LXIII 2016 p. 50"/> Chinese [[verb]]s are [[grammatical tense|tense]]-less: there are several ways to specify when something happened or will happen, but [[verb tense]] is not one of them. For poets, this creates the great advantage of [[ambiguity]]. According to Link, Weinberger's insight about subjectlessness—that it produces an effect "both universal and immediate"—applies to timelessness as well.<ref name="LXIII 2016 p. 50"/> Link proposes a kind of uncertainty principle that may be applicable not only to translation from the Chinese language, but to all translation: {{blockquote|Dilemmas about translation do not have definitive right answers (although there can be unambiguously wrong ones if misreadings of the original are involved). Any translation (except machine translation, a different case) must pass through the mind of a translator, and that mind inevitably contains its own store of perceptions, memories, and values. Weinberger [...] pushes this insight further when he writes that "every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader's intellectual and emotional life." Then he goes still further: because a reader's mental life shifts over time, there is a sense in which "the same poem cannot be read twice."<ref name="LXIII 2016 p. 50"/>}} ====Islamic world==== Translation of material into [[Arabic language|Arabic]] expanded after the creation of [[Arabic script]] in the 5th century, and gained great importance with the rise of [[Islam]] and Islamic empires. Arab translation initially focused primarily on politics, rendering Persian, Greek, even Chinese and Indic diplomatic materials into Arabic. 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 [[Madrasah of Al-Karaouine|Al-Karaouine]] ([[Fes]], [[Morocco]]), [[Al-Azhar Madrasah|Al-Azhar]] ([[Cairo]], [[Egypt]]), and the [[Al-Nizamiyya of Baghdad]]. In terms of theory, Arabic translation drew heavily on earlier Near Eastern traditions as well as more contemporary Greek and Persian traditions. Arabic translation efforts and techniques are important to Western translation traditions due to centuries of close contacts and exchanges. Especially after the [[Renaissance]], Europeans began more intensive study of Arabic and Persian translations of classical works as well as scientific and philosophical works of Arab and oriental origins. Arabic, and to a lesser degree Persian, became important sources of material and perhaps of techniques for revitalized Western traditions, which in time would overtake the Islamic and oriental traditions. In the 19th century, after the [[Middle East]]'s [[Islam]]ic clerics and copyists {{blockquote|had conceded defeat in their centuries-old battle to contain the corrupting effects of the [[printing press]], [an] explosion in publishing ... ensued. Along with expanding secular education, printing transformed an overwhelmingly illiterate society into a partly literate one. In the past, the [[sheikh]]s and the government had exercised a monopoly over knowledge. Now an expanding elite benefitted from a stream of information on virtually anything that interested them. Between 1880 and 1908... more than six hundred newspapers and periodicals were founded in Egypt alone. The most prominent among them was ''al-Muqtataf'' ... [It] was the popular expression of a '''translation movement''' that had begun earlier in the century with military and medical manuals and highlights from the [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]] canon. ([[Montesquieu]]'s ''Considerations on the Romans'' and [[Fénelon]]'s ''Telemachus'' had been favorites.)<ref name = debellaigue77>[[Christopher de Bellaigue]], "Dreams of Islamic Liberalism" (review of Marwa Elshakry, ''Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950'', University of Chicago Press), ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'', vol. LXII, no. 10 (June 4, 2015), p. 77.</ref>}} 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 [[Muslims|Muslim]] students. After returning to Cairo with the encouragement of [[Muhammad Ali of Egypt|Muhammad Ali]] (1769–1849), the [[Ottoman Empire|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]]''. This was the biggest, most meaningful importation of foreign thought into Arabic since [[Abbasid]] times (750–1258).<ref>[[Malise Ruthven]], "The Islamic Road to the Modern World" (review of [[Christopher de Bellaigue]], ''The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times'', Liveright; and Wael Abu-'Uksa, ''Freedom in the Arab World: Concepts and Ideologies in Arabic Thought in the Nineteenth Century'', Cambridge University Press), ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'', vol. LXIV, no. 11 (22 June 2017), p. 22.</ref> {{blockquote|In France al-Tahtawi had been struck by the way the French language... was constantly renewing itself to fit modern ways of living. Yet [[Arabic]] has its own sources of reinvention. The root system that Arabic shares with other [[Semitic languages|Semitic]] tongues such as Hebrew is capable of expanding the meanings of words using structured [[consonant]]al variations: the word for airplane, for example, has the same root as the word for bird.<ref>[[Malise Ruthven]], "The Islamic Road to the Modern World" (review of [[Christopher de Bellaigue]], ''The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times'', Liveright; and Wael Abu-'Uksa, ''Freedom in the Arab World: Concepts and Ideologies in Arabic Thought in the Nineteenth Century'', Cambridge University Press), ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'', vol. LXIV, no. 11 (22 June 2017), p. 24.</ref>}} [[File:Muhammad Abduh (trimmed).JPG|thumb|upright=.8|[[Muhammad Abduh]]]] The movement to translate English and European texts transformed the Arabic and [[Ottoman Turkey|Ottoman]] [[Turkish language|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. It had come to include virtually any intellectual production anywhere in the world." One of the [[neologisms]] that, in a way, came to characterize the infusion of new ideas via translation was ''"darwiniya"'', or "[[Darwinism]]".<ref name = debellaigue77/> One of the most influential liberal Islamic thinkers of the time was [[Muhammad Abduh]] (1849–1905), Egypt's senior judicial authority—its chief [[mufti]]—at the turn of the 20th century and an admirer of [[Charles Darwin|Darwin]] who in 1903 visited Darwin's exponent [[Herbert Spencer]] at his home in [[Brighton]]. Spencer's view of [[social organism|society as an organism]] with its own laws of evolution paralleled Abduh's ideas.<ref>[[Christopher de Bellaigue]], "Dreams of Islamic Liberalism" (review of Marwa Elshakry, ''Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950''), ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'', vol. LXII, no. 10 (4 June 2015), p. 77–78.</ref> After [[World War I]], when Britain and France divided up the Middle East's countries, apart from Turkey, between them, pursuant to the [[Sykes-Picot agreement]]—in violation of solemn wartime promises of postwar Arab autonomy—there came an immediate reaction: the [[Muslim Brotherhood]] emerged in Egypt, the [[House of Saud]] took over the [[Hijaz]], and regimes led by army officers came to power in [[Iran]] and Turkey. "[B]oth illiberal currents of the modern Middle East," writes [[Christopher de Bellaigue|de Bellaigue]], "Islamism and militarism, received a major impetus from Western [[Imperialism|empire-builders]]." As often happens in countries undergoing social crisis, the aspirations of the Muslim world's translators and modernizers, such as [[Muhammad Abduh]], largely had to yield to retrograde currents.<ref>[[Christopher de Bellaigue]], "Dreams of Islamic Liberalism" (review of Marwa Elshakry, ''Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950''), ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'', vol. LXII, no. 10 (4 June 2015), p. 78.</ref> Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page