- •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.
Employment of translators and interpreters in wars in ancient times.
Interpreters and translators of the Persian and Indian languages are known to have been employed in Europe in the fourth century BC by Alexander the Great (356-323), the emperor of Macedonia, during his military campaign against Persia and India.
Interpreters and translators of the Persian and Indian languages are known to have been employed in Europe in the fourth century BC by Alexander the Great (356-323), the emperor of Macedonia, during his military campaign against Persia and India. Romans in their numerous wars also employed interpreters/translators (especially during the Punic Wars with Carthage in the second and third centuries BC). Unfortunately, little or nothing is practically known about the employment of translation in state affairs in other European countries of those times, though translators/interpreters must certainly have been employed on the same occasions and with the same purposes as in the Middle East. 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.
Used during the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
Also employed during the WW I, II for spying, examination/questioning of prisoners of war, searching for prominent scholars and kidnapping them. During the WW II the English and the French exported Danish scientist Niels Bohr who then worked in Sweden and Great Britain.
The Septuagint and the historically first principle of translation.
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.
The bulk of the Septuagint is known today to have been a slavishly literal (word-for-word) translation of the original Jewish Scripture. Much later around 130 AD another Jewish translator, Aguila of Sinope, made one more slavishly literal translation of the Old Testament to replace the Septuagint.
There were also other Greek translations of the Old Testament, which are unfortunately lost to us today. Consequently, only the Septuagint can be subjected to a thorough analysis from the point of view of the principles, the method and the level of its literary translation.
One of several available graphic examples of slavish literalism, i.e., of strict word-for-word translation both at the lexical/semantic and structural level, may be seen in the Old Slavonic translations of the Bible from the Kyivan Rus' period as well as during the succeeding centuries. This may easily be noticed even from the latest (1992 and 1997) Ukrainian publications of the Holy Scriptures.