In this chapter the historical development of the theory and practice of translation up to our days will be analyzed. In the practice of translation we can distinguish the following historical types: the word-by-word translation, the "loose" translation, free translation, proper translation and the contemporary translation.
Word-by-word translation
The translation originated in Ancient Egypt. Many bilingual dictionaries in tablets of terracotta found in Asia Minor give evidence of the existence of the translation. They were translations of papyri that dealt with economy and politics and religious texts.
The translation of religious texts required an absolute precision by the translators - a word by word precision due to the fear of losing or altering the sense of the Divine Word.
All this has led to the appearance of the word-by-word translation.
This translation consists in the literal transmission of all the linguistic elements that characterize the original. But this concept of translation led inevitably to a distortion of the content of the prototext.
Loose translation
Many faults characterized the word-by-word translation and thus a new type of translation began to spread: the loose translation.
The aim of this translation was to convey the general sense of the original. The text could be freely adapted, summed up, transformed according to the particular needs. Later on, this kind of translation was believed not to be able to pass an invariant information.
Free translation
At the end of the 16th century a new kind of translation began to spread in France: the free translation. The reasons that have brought upon this development were aesthetic.
They derived from the development of the translation of artistic texts. This type of translation did not want to convey precisely the original but to bring the prototext to an abstract standard of beauty.
Thus the precision of the translation was not considered in relation to the original, but in relation to the literary reference model of the time.
The proper translation
Starting from the early years of the 18th century a new trend began to develop: reproducing in translation the historical and national features of the original work. This trend thus led to a greater precision. This was the proper translation.
In France the names of the authors linked to this kind of translation were Leconte and Litre; in Germany Schlegel and Schleiemacher , while in England Postheid and Polak.
In Russia the first association of translators was established. The Tsar was eager to westernize his Country and for this reason had an urgent need of good translators and made the job of translator a ministerial office.
This became the more widespread way of translating throughout the world.
The introduction of scientific and technical texts contributed very much to this change. And then the dissemination of this type of texts began to be particularly necessary for the social life.
We saw the birth and the rapid expansion of a new kind of translation: the specialized translation which had purely practical objectives and no regard for aesthetics. The proper translation has thus achieved a higher level of perfection thanks to the thought of Russian school which gave the name to this science.
The basic principles of the school were set out by Lȗdskanov.
Contemporary translation
Given that the practice of translation is in continuous evolution, the quality and accuracy of the translation as well as the technical knowledge of the translator must constantly improve.
Currently, the scope of the translator's work continues to expand. If in the 17th century the number of languages to and from which the translation was possible, was between twenty and thirty, today UNESCO records more than 1,200.
In addition, the practice of translation is expanding to new fields such as the translation for radio and television, and the dubbing of films, while new problems relating to poetic translation and translation for theatre arise. We begin, therefore, to speak of cosmic translation.
Here are listed three different ways to approach the translation research:
· Solitary researchers. They are experts who are personally involved in their scientific preparation and do not pay attention on the bibliography already existing. Most of them are western scientists who do not adequately consider the research conducted in socialist Countries.
· Research Centers on literary translation. These are institutions where there are experts, theorists and historians dealing with literary translation. This activity is also carried out by magazines such as Babel, the magazine of the International Federation of Translators (IFT).
· Translation Research Schools. The Soviet theory of translation holds the first place and has generated two distinct schools: the Soviet classical school whose representatives are Kaškin, Levik and Toper and the other theory of which Fëdorov has laid the foundations. His main research center is Torez, the Institute of foreign languages in Moscow. The results of the research are published in Tetradi perevodčika [The notebooks of the translator], the magazine directed by Barhudarov.
The birth of automatic translation
The increase in the number of translations of scientific texts led to a new question: the automation of the translation process in technical and scientific texts. Therefore, in 1946 the professor William Weaver proposed the use of computers to translate from one language to another and computerize the translation process, publishing his memorandum entitled Translation.
The first practical research in this direction were carried out by Troânskij, a Soviet engineer. In 1952 the first conference dedicated to the problems of automatic translation was organized in the United States and the first research group started. We can make three conflicting considerations on automatic translation:
· A high quality computer-aided translation is impossible because the linguistic activity of a man cannot be translated into formulas;
· It is possible to achieve a not autonomous automatic translation only of technical-scientific texts because there are problems that the machine cannot resolve as the polysemy, the homonymy, synonymity and idiomatic expressions;
· Is it possible to achieve an high quality autonomous automatic translation of technical and scientific texts and in the future of artistic texts too.
The first hypothesis was based on the idea that the machine must be only an aid for the translator, that is to give the lexical meaning of all the words of the text. The translator’s task is only to draw up the final version of the translation.
In a subsequent stage of research they got to another conclusion: the machine must not help the translator, but the specialist who wants to have a direct access to the original. It was thought that the automatic translation should give him only a limited information of the prototext. This information would have allowed him to get a general idea of the content of the text and let him decide if a professional translator was needed.
Afterwards, a growing number of specialists started to analyze the idea of an autonomous automatic translation. It is the machine that has to translate, excluding any human intervention. Research led to the first realization of an autonomous automatic translation and this experiment is known as the "Experiment of Georgetown".
On January 7, 1954 in New York a machine realized an autonomous translation of thirty phrases (written specifically for this experiment) from Russian to English. But the first over-optimistic forecasts were soon countered by a series of subsequent reflections: theoretically the automatic translation of scientific texts is possible, but the realization of this kind of translation for narrative texts is only a hypothesis.
The artificial languages elements are based on the principle of one-to-one correspondence: it follows that their elements always have only one meaning completely independent from the context. This simplifies to the maximum the decoding of the message and therefore the processes of analysis and synthesis too. The replacement of a component with the other is purely mechanical.
Natural languages represent a different case because they are not based on one-to-one correspondence and the majority of their elements are polysemous. The decoding of the message requires a choice. This process is thus defined creative. Therefore the translator will carry out a series of creative choices in order to preserve the invariant information compared to a certain system of reference.
