History of Translation Timeline

Translation into Arabic expanded after the creation of Arabic script in the 5th century. Its importance grew further with the rise of Islam and Islamic empires, which connected Arabic-speaking societies with diverse intellectual and religious traditions.

Image source: Arabic script

Greek and Coptic texts appear to have begun being translated into Arabic as early as the late 7th century, possibly through Syriac intermediaries. These efforts helped establish Arabic as a major language for transmitting earlier knowledge.

The second Abbasid Caliph funded a translation bureau in Baghdad in the 8th century. This institutional support contributed to the flourishing of Arabic translation and the transmission of Greek, Roman, Persian, and other works.

Image source: House of Wisdom

From the middle of the 11th century, European scholars began translating Arabic versions of lost Greek and Roman works into European languages. These projects drew on Arabic knowledge of classical texts and intensified contacts between Islamic and European intellectual traditions.

The establishment of the Toledo School of Translators in Spain helped accelerate the movement of scientific, philosophical, and classical learning from Arabic into European languages. Toledo became a major center of cross-cultural translation.

Image source: Toledo School of Translators

King Alfonso X of Castile promoted translation during the 13th century by founding a Schola Traductorum, or School of Translation, in Toledo. His patronage supported the circulation of knowledge among Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and vernacular communities.

Image source: Alfonso X of Castile

The establishment of the Madrasat al-Alsun, or School of Tongues, in Egypt in 1813 revived the translation of foreign works for publication in Arabic. It formed part of a broader Arabic translation movement.

The Egyptian cleric Rifaa al-Tahtawi contributed greatly to the Islamic Enlightenment. After spending five years in Paris in the late 1820s, he returned to Cairo and became a leading figure in Egypt's modern translation movement.

Image source: Rifa'a at-Tahtawi

With the encouragement of Muhammad Ali, al-Tahtawi became head of Egypt's new school of languages and initiated a program translating roughly two thousand European and Turkish volumes. The subjects ranged from geography and geometry to Voltaire, the Marseillaise, and the Code Napoléon.

Between 1880 and 1908, more than six hundred newspapers and periodicals were founded in Egypt. This publishing expansion popularized a translation movement that had begun earlier in the century with military, medical, and Enlightenment texts.

A 17th-century French critic coined the phrase les belles infidèles to suggest that a translation could be faithful or beautiful, but not both. The phrase captured a long-running tension between fidelity and stylistic elegance.

In the second half of the 17th century, John Dryden sought to make Virgil speak in words he might have written had he been living and English. This approach emphasized natural literary effect over strict verbal correspondence.

Image source: John Dryden

In 1672, John Dryden objected to a phrase by Ben Jonson and helped establish a proscription against preposition stranding. His intervention shows how translators could influence the evolution of language and literary style.

Throughout the 18th century, ease of reading became the dominant watchword of translators. The period also saw many translators move beyond translation proper into adaptation, continuing a practice especially associated with earlier periods.

Since Johann Gottfried Herder in the 18th century, it has been considered axiomatic in translation theory that one translates toward one's own language. The principle formalized a tendency associated earlier with Martin Luther.

Image source: Johann Gottfried Herder

In 1783, the Polish poet and grammarian Onufry Kopczyński argued that assiduous reading, together with listening to spoken language, offered a more comprehensive guide to a language than dictionaries alone.

Alexander Tytler's Essay on the Principles of Translation, published in 1790, emphasized that assiduous reading provides a more comprehensive guide to a language than dictionaries. The work contributed to the development of systematic translation criticism.

In his 1813 lecture On the Different Methods of Translation, Friedrich Schleiermacher distinguished between moving the writer toward the reader through transparency and moving the reader toward the author through fidelity to the source text's foreignness.

Image source: Friedrich Schleiermacher

Edmund Chojecki's 1847 Polish translation of Jan Potocki's French novel The Saragossa Manuscript preserved fragments whose original French manuscript was later lost. The case demonstrates how back-translations can preserve otherwise vanished texts.

Edward FitzGerald's 1859 Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam became an outstanding 19th-century translation. Its Oriental flavor came partly from Persian names and Biblical echoes, even though much of its material departed from the Persian original.

In 1871, Benjamin Jowett established a new translation pattern by rendering Plato in simple, straightforward language. His example anticipated the later 20th-century shift toward accuracy as the principal criterion of translation.

Lin Shu's first major translation, Past Stories of the Camellia-woman of Paris, based on Alexandre Dumas fils's La Dame aux Camélias, was published in 1899. Although Lin knew no foreign languages, he worked with his friend Wang Shouchang, who had studied in France.

In 1921, Joseph Conrad attempted to translate Bruno Winawer's Polish play The Book of Job into English. Because Conrad had long had little contact with everyday spoken Polish, he predictably missed many nuances of contemporary Polish.

In 1946, Ezra Pound advised the young poet W. S. Merwin that translation was the best teacher he would ever have. Merwin later described translation as an impossible and unfinishable art, reflecting its creative and interpretive demands.

Image source: W. S. Merwin

In his 1959 paper On Linguistic Aspects of Translation, Roman Jakobson declared that poetry is untranslatable by definition. His claim became a major reference point in debates over whether poetic form and meaning can be transferred between languages.

Image source: Roman Jakobson

Vladimir Nabokov published an English translation of Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin in prose in 1964. Like Jakobson, he considered rhymed and metrical poetry fundamentally untranslatable and prioritized literal accuracy over reproducing the original verse form.

Image source: Eugene Onegin

In his 1997 book Le Ton beau de Marot, Douglas Hofstadter argued that translating a poem requires conveying as much as possible of its literal meaning and its formal structure, including meter, rhyme, and alliteration.

In 1999, Douglas Hofstadter published his own verse translation of Eugene Onegin. The project contrasted with Nabokov's prose version and reflected Hofstadter's belief that a good translation should convey a poem's literal meaning, form, and structure as fully as possible.

By 2010, web-based human translation had been gaining popularity as a relatively fast and accurate way to translate business communications, legal documents, medical records, and software localization. It developed alongside, rather than simply replacing, machine translation.

Image source: Translation

Meytal Radzinski launched the Women in Translation campaign in 2014 to address the underrepresentation of women authors in translated literature. The campaign brought visibility to gender disparities in international publishing and translation.

In 2015, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival commissioned professional translations of the entire Shakespeare canon, including disputed works such as Edward III, into contemporary vernacular English. In 2019, the translated canon was presented in a month-long series of staged readings.

As of 2015, the international market for science-fiction translations showed an increasing presence of source languages other than English. This development reflected a broader diversification of translated literature and international publishing.

Image source: Science fiction

As of 2018, professional translator Mark Polizzotti argued that machine translation systems such as Google Translate were unlikely to threaten human translators soon. He maintained that machines would not easily grasp nuance and connotation.

Image source: Machine translation