What is our philosophy?
The philosophy of translation has remained consistent throughout the thousands of years since the ancient Greeks devised the concepts of ‘paraphrase’ and ‘metaphrase’. Scholars such as Horace and Cicero expressed caution against ‘word-for-word’ translation, and this sentiment has been repeated throughout the works of other seminal Western translators like John Dryden and Ignacy Krasicki. As […]
The integral necessity of human translation
A large and very significant reason as to why human translation will stay relevant and useful is the existence of “low-resource” languages. This is a term coined by programmers to describe languages have little or no data available to use fortraining conversational AI systems. Languages like English, Spanish, and Chinese havemillions upon millions of published […]
Translation as a means of power
While you’ve probably heard of the Rosetta stone (the trilingual inscription written in ancient Greek, Egyptian and Demotic), the lesser known inscription of Xerxes I, King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire, made around 500 BC, often goes ignored. It’s written in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian, all of these being offshoots of Cuneiform, the […]
The father of biblical translations
The German people owe a big deal of their language to a single man: the figure behind the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther. Because of his translation of the Bible (from Ancient Greek to German), the country’s language shifted. His translation was localized, so that, in his words, “the mother in the home and the plain […]
The apparent importance of translation to our ancestors
The fact that translation has been valued and practiced for millennia shows of its importance in our communication. One of the most significant moments in translation history (at least for the French) was when Charles VThe Wise (1338-1380) commissioned a translation of Aristotle’s ‘Politics’, ‘Ethics’, and ‘Economics’, which were of considerable value to the young […]
#TheGreatTranslationMovement
The Great Translation Movement continues to cause waves in the online political world, but it’s important to make certain things clear about the implications of such an event.On one hand, exposing the pro-war rallies ofpropagandists seems like a righteous cause, but doing so can lead people to generalize about the Chinese population.On the other, it […]
Marco Polo and Translation
Marco Polo was one of the most influential explorers and travelers of his time, and his exploits inthe eastern hemisphere affected commerce, culture, and the arts during the 13th and 14th centuries. What is less known about him is how exactly his famous account, ‘The Travels of Marco Polo’ came intobeing. Upon returning to his […]
To translate is to betray
“Translator, traitor»- Italian proverb This quote originates from the italian phrase ‘traduttore, traditore’, which implies that, in order to translate anything, you must betray some aspect of the original text, as a complete translation of any text cannot possibly convey every truth about the source. Even the quote above is not translated in its entirety, […]
Humans vs. Machines
After so much talk of machine translation, we’d like to remind our readers why human translation will always prevail in terms of accuracy and completeness. Here are five reasons why machine translations will never replace human translators: 1. Machines cannot understand culture: The intricacies of a country’s culture reflects on their language, and such nuances […]
The most translated movie ever
If you know that the Bible is the most translated book of all time, then it should come to no surprise that the most widely translated movie (and, according to TheNew York Times and the BBC, the most watched movie of all time) is 1979’s «Jesus» (or, «The Jesus Film»), directed by Peter Sykes and […]
