- •The role of translation and interpretation in present-day interstate and international relations.
- •Duties of Interpreters and Translators
- •Important Qualities for Interpreters and Translators
- •Prehistory of European interpretation and translation.
- •Translation and interpretation in Ancient Egypt, Babylon, Assyria.
- •Employment of translators and interpreters in wars in ancient times.
- •Aquila’s translation of the Old Testament.
- •Symmachus’ translation of the Old Testament.
- •Jerome’s Latin Vulgate.
- •Translation in Ancient Rome. Livius Andronicus and his translations in the 3rd century b.C.
- •Cicero and the birth of the historically second principle of translation.
- •Deliberate violations of the second (sense-to-sense) way/principle of translation by Horace and Apuleius and their consequences in the Middle Ages and later periods.
- •Principles of translation of ecclesiastic and secular works during the Middle Ages.
- •Translation in England during the medieval period. King Alfred the Great and Abbot Aelfric as translators.
- •Schools of translation in the Middle Ages.
- •Factors favoring the revival of translation during the period of the Renaissance in Europe.
- •Translation in France in the Renaissance period. E. Dolet and his principles of translation.
- •The belles-infidels’ principle of translation (j. Amyot, n.P. D’Ablancourt and others).
- •Translation in Germany in the period of the Renaissance (Steinhöwel, von Eyb, and others).
- •The Luther Bible and its significance. Luther’s influence on the emergence of the German language and national identity.
- •The Tyndale Bible and its importance in shaping and influencing the English language.
- •Translation in the periods of Classicism and Enlightenment (seventeenth – eighteenth centuries).
- •The epoch of Romanticism and protests against the unrestricted freedom of translation in England, Germany and France.
- •The revival of translation in Ukraine in the 14th-16th centuries (translation of the Bible and other ecclesiastic works).
- •The Kyiv Mohyla Academy and development of translation in the 17th-18th centuries Ukraine (I. Maksymovych, f. Prokopovych, d. Tuptalo, h. Skovoroda).
- •I. Kotlyarevskyi’s free interpretation of Virgil’s Aeneid.
- •The methods of translation of p. Hulak-Artemovskyi, Ye. Hrebinka, l. Borovykovskyi, p. Bilets’kyi-Nosenko in the first half of the 19th century.
- •P. Kulish as a translator. His methods of translation.
- •M. Shashkevych, I. Vahylevych, y. Holovats’kyi and the beginning of translation in Halychyna in 1830s.
- •L. Ukrainka and I. Franko as translators.
- •The most often employed methods of translation and the artistic level of translation of classical British, American, French, German and Italian prose/poetic works during the 1920s and 1930s.
- •The revival of Ukrainian translation after World War II in the mid and 1940s (m.Ryl’skyi, m.Tereshchenko, m.Bazhan, m.Lukash, l.Pervomaiskyi).
- •The historical circumstances and preconditions of birth and development of Ukrainian criticism of literary artistic translation in the 20th centurary.
- •Domestication vs. Translation. Their difference.
Prehistory of European interpretation and translation.
Translation and interpretation in Ancient Egypt, Babylon, Assyria.
World translation in general and European translation in particular has a long and praiseworthy tradition. Even the scarcity of documents available at the disposal of historians points to its incessant millenniums-long employment in international relations both in ancient China, India, in the Middle East (Assyria, Babylon) and Egypt. The earliest mention of translation used in viva voce goes back to approximately the year 3000 BC in ancient Egypt where the interpreters and later also reqular translators were employed to help in carrying on trade with the neighbouring country of Nubia. The dragomans had been employed to accompany the trade caravans and help in negotiating, selling and buying the necessary goods for Egypt. Also in those ancient times (2400 BC), the Assyrian emperor Sargon of the city of Akkada (Mesopotamia), is known to have circulated his order of the day translated into some languages of the subject countries. The emperor boasted of his victories in an effort to intimidate his neighbours. In 2100 BC, Babylon translations are known to have been performed into some naighboring languages including, first of all, Egyptian. The city of Babylon in those times was a regular centre of polyglots where translations were accomplished in several languages. As far back as 1900 BC, in Babylon, there existed the first known bilingual (Sumerian-Akkadian) and multilingual (Sumerian-Akkadian-Hurritian-Ugaritian) dictionaries. In 1800 BC, in Assyria there was already something of a board of translators headed by the chief translator/interpreter, a certain Giki. The first trade agreement is known to have been signed in two languages between Egypt and its southern neighbour Nubia in 1200 BC.
The inevitable employment of translation/interpretation was predetermined by the need to maintain intercommunal and international relations which always exist between different ethnic groups as well as between separate nations and their individual representatives.
The history of European translation, however, is known to have started as far back as 280 BC with the translation of some excerpts of The Holy Scriptures1. The real history of translation into European languages, however, is supposed to have begun in 250 BC in the Egyptian city of Alexandria which belonged to the great Greek empire. The local leaders of the Jewish community there decided to translate the Old Testament from Hebrew, which had once been their native tongue, but which was no longer understood, into ancient Greek, which became their spoken language. Tradition states that 72 learned Jews, each working separately, prepared during their translation in 70 days the Greek variant of the Hebrew original. When the translators met, according to that same tradition, their translations were found to be identical to each other in every word. In reality, however, the Septuagint (Latin for «seventy»), as this translation has been called since then, took in fact several hundreds of years to complete. According to reliable historical sources2, various translators worked on the Septuagint after that, each having made his individual contribution to this fundamental document of Christianity in his national language.