Greek Septuagint –The Septuagint is the earliest Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures that was adopted by the Christians. Its translation process, which spanned over a long period starting in the 3rd c BCE and ending in the 1st c BCE, took place in stages and has been described as ‘the first major translation in western culture’ (Tessa Rajak, Translation and Survival: The Greek Bible of the Ancient Jewish Diaspora, OUP, 2009). Some believed that the translators who worked in the process had divine inspiration. The Septuagint became the basis of old Latin versions of the Bible, collectively known as the Vetus Latina, and also of the Coptic, old Slavonic, old Armenian, old Georgian and old Syriac versions of the Old Testament. St Jerome also used it (see St Jerome), along with the Hebrew version, for his translation of the Bible.
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) - Roman rhetorician and politician. In his work De optimo genere oratorum (46 BCE) he outlines his approach to translation as avoiding the then normal practice of ‘word-for-word’ translation, which replaced each individual word of the ST with its closest grammatical equivalent in the TL, aiming instead to reproduce the ‘general style and force of the language’. In Western translation theory Cicero is often identified with the concepts of literal and free translation.
St Jerome (347-420) - Theologian and historian who in 395 completed his translation of the Bible commissioned by Pope Damasus. This would later become known as the Latin Vulgate. As a basis for it, St Jerome took not only the Greek Septuagint, the traditional reference, but also the Hebrew version of the Bible, in what was a controversial decision at the time (see Greek Septuagint). Thus, St Jerome was the first to note differences between the two versions. St Jerome explained that he had translated ’not “word-for-word” but “sense-for-sense”’, therefore setting out the dichotomy that would dominate much of the study of translation until the 20th century.
’word-for-word’ – ‘word for word’ translation, as opposed to its opposite ‘sense-for-sense’ translation, refers to a form of translation in which a SL word is replaced by the closest TL correspondent (see also ‘literal translation’ in Cicero).
‘sense-for-sense’ - ‘sense-for-sense’ translation, as opposed to its opposite ‘word-for-word’ translation, attempts to translate the meaning of the word within its context and within target language requirements. (See also ‘free’ translation’ in Cicero).
‘fidelity’, ‘spirit’ and ‘truth’ - The use of these concepts has varied through time. Fidelity, or faithfulness, was dismissed by the Roman poet Horace (65 – 8 BCE) as literal ‘word–for–word’ translation. However, at the end of the seventeenth century fi trans had come to be identified with faithfulness to the meaning rather than the words. Spirit similarly has been used in various ways: the Latin word spiritus denotes creative energy or inspiration, proper to literature, but St Augustine (354-430 CE) used it to mean the Holy Spirit of God, and his contemporary St Jerome employed it in both senses. Much later, spirit lost the religious sense and was used in the sense of the creative energy of a text or language. For St Augustine, spirit and truth (Latin veritas) were intertwined, with truth having the sense of ‘content’; for St Jerome, truth meant the authentic Hebrew Biblical text to which he returned in his Latin Vulgate translation. In the twelfth century, that truth became fully equated with ‘content’.
John Dryden (1631-1700) - English poet and translator. In the preface to his translation of Ovid’s Epistles in 1680, Dryden reduces all translation to three categories: (1) metaphrase, or ‘word by word and line by line’ translation, which corresponds to literal translation; (2) paraphrase: ‘[where the author’s] words are not so strictly followed as his sense’ and which this more or less corresponds to faithful or sense-for-sense translation; and (2) imitation, a free adaptation. .