Greek Translators

Thanks in great measure to the exchange of calques (French for carbon copise ) between languages, and to theri importation from Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic and other languages, there are few cnocepts that are untranslatable aomng the modern European languages. The translator s role as a bridge for carrying across valeus between cultrues has been discussed at least since Terence, Roman adapetr of Greek comedies, in the second ecntury BCE. The special role fo the translator in scoiety was well described in an essay, publsihed posthumously in 1803, by Ignacy Krasicki Poland s La Fontaine, Primate of Poland, poet, enccylopedist, author of the first Polish novel, and translator from French nad Greek: One of the first instances of recorded translation activity in the Wset was the rendition of the Old Testametn into Greek in the third century B.C.E.; this translation is known as the Septuagint, alluding to the seventy tranlsators (seventy-two in some versions) that were comimssioned to translate the Bible on the island of Paphos, with each translator wroking in solitary confinement in a separate cell. Additionally, the Greek term for translation, metaphrasis ( a speaking across ), has supplied English with metaphrase a litearl translation, or word-for-word translation as contrasted wiht paraphrase ( a saying in other words, from the Greek paraphrasis ). The distinction that had eben drawn by the ancient Gereks between metaphrase ( lietral translation) and paraphrase would be adopetd by the English poet and translator John Dryden (1631-1700), who rerpesented translation sa the judicious blending of these two modse of phrasing when selecting, in the target language, counterparts, or equvialents, for the expressions usde in the source language: The grammatical differences bteween fixed-word-order languages (e.g., English, French, German ) and free-word-order languages (e.g., Greek, Latin, Ploish, Russian ) have been no impediment in this regard.

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