| |||||
|
International Translation Day – a world without barriers
- 30 September 2022
International Translation Day is celebrated on 30 September. It is the one day in the year on which translators pull off their invisibility cloak and briefly step into the spotlight, showing the world the importance of this silent and sometimes hidden profession, as well as the impressive skills a translator needs to have nowadays.
It was in 1991 that the International Federation of Translation (FIT) decided to establish International Translation Day. And this year's theme, ‘A world without barriers’, is exactly what translation is all about.
EU citizens have the right to read and understand official communications and EU law in their own language. That is the reason why the Council's website is available in 24 languages. In the Council, the Translation Service is responsible for the translation of documents to which all citizens have a right of access in all official European languages.
This service handles 13 000 translation requests a year and produces an average of 1 million pages of translated text.
How do we define ‘translation’?
According to the dictionary: translate (v. = early 14c.) means ‘to remove from one place to another’, ’to turn from one language to another’, from Old French ‘translater’ and directly from Latin ‘translatus’, meaning ‘carried over’.
It all started with religious texts and the wish to have them widely understood.
The first translation ever seems to have been the religious poem called The Epic of Gilgamesh. Originally written in Sumerian, it was translated into various Asian languages in the Mesopotamia era (2100 BC). Some would argue that various linguistic versions of the poem existed at the same time and should not be considered as actual translations, according to a strict definition of the term.
Other ancient translations were Indian religious texts translated into Chinese by Buddhist monks.
But to find the first ‘real’ translation, we need to move through time, up to the third century BC. In that period, the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew into Greek, thus becoming the basis of future Bible translations into multiple languages. In the fourth century AD, Saint Jerome translated the Bible into Latin: this is why he later became the patron saint of translation, his feast day being celebrated on 30 September.
Since then, translation has been recognised as a specific skill. Even so, it was not always clear what this entailed. The first translators were also authors as they adapted, changed, omitted and amended textual content. The concept of keeping close to the original text did not even exist.
Translation was first recognised as a discipline in the 1950s, with the appearance of targeted study courses and training. Translation Studies has, in the meantime, become an academic course. This covers a various subjects ranging from traditional fields (such as terminology, semiotics, philosophy, philology, linguistics and history) to computer science, which is necessary to deal with modern challenges using technological means.
What is translation nowadays?
All of us are constantly surrounded by translations. Where do we need them? Everywhere! Conferences, films, books, instruction manuals, the operating systems and interfaces of our devices, sometimes even horoscopes and love letters.
And translations appear in many forms. There are conventional written translations, subtitles, as well as simultaneous or consecutive interpreting, interpreting on the phone, summaries in another language, and audio descriptions for the visually impaired.
In one sense, we are all translators now!
There's more to it if we consider translation in the broadest sense possible.
While studying a new language, we translate in our mind. The hope is obviously that the day will come when our mind will automatically switch to a foreign language without having to painstakingly translate first each word, then each sentence, then longer and more complex concepts.
Translations are also a source of comic relief. Who among us doesn't look for funny translations while abroad? Many translators love perusing menus in other countries and finding funny renditions of local specialties. Please pay attention when you next travel; you might find some gems, such as the Chinglish example(s) in the picture(s).
One might go so far as to say that we all live in a translated world, where content in any language is almost always accessible to anyone anywhere. Some devices offer immediate automatic translation/interpreting into a huge variety of languages.
Human vs machine in translation
While browsing the internet, Google Translate is often used for a large range of languages. In the EU institutions, eTranslation (an online machine translation tool developed interinstitutional Ly) forms part of the tools that our translators use, along with our interinstitutional translation memories.
After the sometimes very funny results of the first attempts, automatic translation has now reached a very good level of reliability, depending on the language combinations used.
Will this ever reach the perfection level of the Star Trek Universal translator? This is unlikely as there is simply too much in a language (and especially in a culture) that needs a certain level of knowledge and sensitivity to nuance and shades of meaning to be properly understood and then conveyed in another language. But for fairly straightforward texts, automatic translation can provide an idea of what is being said in another language.
For creative, convoluted, idiomatic and poetic texts, translators will always be the go-to choice, as only a human is able to offer readers from a different cultural and linguistic background an equally pleasant reading experience. This is because translators do not translate words; they translate ideas, concepts, meanings, and realities.
On 30 September, let us spare a thought for the (mostly) invisible bridges and links that translators build and establish, enabling us to move between languages, cultures and mentalities, and between similar different outlooks on the world that only the magic of translation can bring together. Happy Feast Day of St. Jerome!
This post does not necessarily represent the positions, policies, or opinions of the Council of the European Union or the European Council.
The Council Library reading room is open on Monday to Friday from 12.30 to 15.30. The Info Desk operates during office hours from Monday to Friday.
