Translation

translation [Lat.,=carrying across], the rendering of a text into another language. Applied to literature, the term connotes the art of recomposing a work in another language without losing its original flavor, or of finding an analogous substitute, for example, Scott Moncrieff’s Remembrance of Things Past for Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, which, translated literally, means “Looking for Lost Time.” Translations of the most ancient texts extant into modern languages are called decipherments. Two well-known examples are the decoding of the Egyptian hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone (see under Rosetta) by Jean François Champollion and the decoding of the Persian cuneiform inscriptions on the rock of Behistun by Henry Rawlinson. Translating sacred texts has always been the chief means by which a culture transmits its values to posterity. Important translations of the Bible began with the Vulgate (Hebrew and Greek into Latin) of St. Jerome in the 4th cent. A.D. English translations of the Bible include that of John Wyclif in the 14th cent. (from Latin), William Tyndale’s in the 16th cent. (from Hebrew and Greek), and the great Authorized Version of 1611, the King James Version, which has been called the most influential work of translation in any language. The Renaissance was a golden age of translations, especially into English. Renewed interest in the Latin classics created a demand for renderings of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (tr. by Arthur Golding, 1565–67), Vergil’s Aeneid (tr. by Gawin Douglas, c.1515; Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, c.1540; and Richard Stanyhurst, 1582), and Plutarch’s Lives (tr. by Sir Thomas North, 1579). The flavor of these renderings is indicated in the opening lines of Stanyhurst’s Aeneid: “Now manhood and garbroyles [battles] I chaunt, and martial horror.” In addition there were translations of important contemporary works into English: Castiglione’s Courtier (tr. by Sir Thomas Hoby, 1561), Montaigne’s Essais (tr. by John Florio, 1603), and Cervantes’s Don Quixote (tr. by John Shelton, 1612). Notable translations of the 19th and 20th cent. include Baudelaire’s translations of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Proust, and Eustache Morel’s translation of James Joyce. American authors whose works have been translated into several European languages include Mark Twain, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Pearl Buck, Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind), and Upton Sinclair, who set a record with translations into 47 languages.

source: http://www.answers.com/translation&r=67

“A good translator has to understand not just the original language, but also one’s own into which these texts are being put,” Galeone said. Despite assurances to the contrary, he said, the new texts are “slavish” with respect to the Latin originals.

The “linguistic ghetto” argument against government-sponsored bilingualism goes back at least a few decades. The earliest relevant citation I’ve found actually relates to bilingual policies in Canada, not the US. The Dec. 28, 1969 New York Times quotes conservative leader Robert L. Stanfield warning of the “linguistic ghettos” that would be created by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s language policy. Stanfield was specifically complaining about plans for French-only military units. Trudeau responded, “Certainly, it would be a false description to call these units ghettos.”

Ezra Pound in turn suggested that before one write poetry, one should translate a lot of it, so as to internalize “the greats” as well as get through the learning stages without perpetually having to reinvent the wheel. One could see how Sappho or Dante or Lorca handled a particular writing problem so that, decades later, one might come to a problematic line-break (or whatever) with some sense that it had a history, that the decision one made carried with it more than the tactical need to get to the next line. The process also had two salutary side-effects: it got a lot of great work back into print in one’s own tongue in a contemporary way, and it tended to marginalize monolinguals among the wannabes, who after all were likely to be riff-raff. —Ron Silliman