Translation The etymology of the very word translation (Latin, "the carrying from one place to another") provides

the simplest definition of the term: translation is an effort to carry a text from one language into another. As elementary as that may sound, dou ts a out the possi ility of translation itself are universal, with none more pithily expressed than in the ancient !talian pun traduttore, traditore ("translator, traitor"). "espite such misgivings, translators have la ored to ridge the linguistic gulfs etween cultures in a variety of fields, resulting today in such speciali#ed wor$ as commercial translation, scientific translation, simultaneous translation (in which an oral presentation is translated into the listener%s language as it is spo$en), and literary translation. &ince all ut literary translations are usually ephemeral, sustained study in the art of translation has een limited to literature. The conse'uences of the mistranslation of political, legal, or commercial discourse can prove catastrophic, however, and the literary de ate a out the nature of accuracy in translation is of wide relevance. At the heart of the de ate is the recognition that a translator carries a culture, not merely a language, from one place to another. The (omans were the first in the )est to comment on translation. *icero, in reference to his own translation of "emosthenes, insisted that the translator must rema$e the original to conform to the conventions of Latin usage. &aint +erome, the ,th-century Latin translator of the .i le, went further, descri ing the text as a prisoner to e dealt with y the translator as if y a con'ueror. This notion was expanded y (enaissance theorists to examine the effect of translation on the stylistic possi ilities of a host language. The crowning achievement of (enaissance translation demonstrates such an effect: the influence of the /ing +ames .i le (0100) on succeeding 2nglish literature is widely recogni#ed. !n the 03th century, however, a far more radical theory of translation was offered. The 4erman theologian 5riedrich &chleiermacher proposed in an 0607 treatise that, rather than carry the foreign wor$ to the reader y rema$ing it to o serve the reader%s conventions of usage, the translator might actually carry the reader to the foreign text. ((udolf 8annwit#, a later theorist, went so far as to argue that the tas$ of the 4erman translator was not to turn 9indi into 4erman ut to turn 4erman into 9indi.) This shift of perspective ushered in the great modern age of translation, which is distinguished y such masterwor$s as &ir (ichard .urton%s translation of The Thousand and :ne ;ights (or A(A.!A; ;!49T&, 066<-66), *./. &cott =oncrieff%s translation of =arcel 8roust%s (2=2=.(A;*2 :5 T9!;4& 8A&T (03>>-70), and Arthur )aley%s translation of =urasa$i &hi$i u%s TAL2 :5 42;+! (03><-77). The issue of untranslata ility has een a central preoccupation of >?th-century theorists, such as 2#ra 8ound. Although actually first suggested y "ante in his *onvivio (07?,-?@), the notion of poetry as that which is lost in translation has ecome a truism in this century. "espite such concerns many of the finest modern poets have produced nota le translations of poetry and verse drama, starting with 8ound himself and continuing with such poet-translators as 2li#a eth .ishop, (ichard 9oward, ). &. =erwin, and (ichard )il ur. &imilar achievements in the translation of fiction have led to wide acclaim for such distinguished translators as 9elen Lane, (alph =anheim, and 4regory (a assa. 5inally, it should e noted that the >?th century has witnessed the invention of a new form of translation, the du ing of foreign films. The future of translation will undou tedly e lin$ed to the development of computer translation programs. )hen computers do finally evolve eyond simple electronic ilingual dictionaries and egin to use contextual clues in the text to choose correctly among the possi le definitions of a word--as well as to interpret accurately the am iguities of syntactical structures of sentences--machine translation may very well transform the practice of this ancient art. +ohn .iguenet .i liography: .rower, (eu en A., ed., :n Translation (03<3)A &teiner, 4eorge, After .a el (03@<)A &chulte, (ainer, and .iguenet, +ohn, eds. Theories of Translation (033>).