History of Translation - 17th Century to 20th Century

12) Translation in the Seventeeth Century:

    Thomas Shelton translated Don Quixote, a Spanish work authored by Cervantes into English. In his Preface to his Pindaric Odes, Abraham Cowley, one of the Metaphysical Poets, condemned word-for-word translation. Dryden translated Juvenal and Virgil. In his Prefaces, Dryden disapproves of metaphrase, that is, word-for-word translation and approves of paraphrase, that is sense-for-sense translation.

13) Translation in the Eighteenth Century:

     The most prominent translator in the eighteenth century was Alexander Pope. He translated Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Pope was criticized for not following the spirit of the original. A critic said: "It is a pretty poem, Mr.Pope, but you must not call it Homer”.

        Another notable translation of the period was George Madison Priest's translation of Goethe's Faust. A.W.Wilhelm translated seventeen plays of Shakespeare into German. The Schlegel -Tick in collaboration translated the other plays of Shakespeare.This collaborative translators faithfully translated not only the verse but also the prose of Shakespeare.

The British East India Company arranged to translate many ancient Indian works from Sanskrit into English. Charles Wilkins translation of the Bhagavad Gita into English and William Jones's translation of Kalidasa's drama Sakuntala into English are worth mentioning.

A theoretical work on translation to this period is the Essay on the Principles of Translation by Alexander Fraser Tytler and Lord Woodhouselee. These two authors emphasized that a translation should have the ease and style of the original and also be a complete transcript of the original.

14) Translation in the Nineteenth Century:

       Translations were abundant in the nineteenth century. Thomas Carlyle translated Goethe's Wilhelm Meicester . Longfellow translated Dante's Divine Comedy .Edward Fitzerald translated six plays of Calderon from Spanish into English and Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam from Persian into English. The Rubaiyat is considered as the best translation in English.

      In his Defence of Poetry Shelley discouraged translation, saying it was a futile exercise. He said that the genius of one writer cannot be transfused by another writer just as the secret of the colour and odour of a violet cannot be discovered by casting it into a crucible.In his essay On Translating Homer, Matthew Arnold also condemned translation. He said that translating a great work in order to satisfy the whims of the local reader is like taking a blind man for one's guide.

15) Translation in the Twentieth Century:

         Official efforts are taken in the twentieth century to streamline translation studies. In 1964 a popular Translation Workshop was conducted at lowa in the United States. In 1965 the University of Texas established the National Translation Centre. The plays of Ibsen and Bernard Shaw, the great phonetician, orator and politician, the essays of Bertrand Russell and the short stories of O.Henry and Anton Chekov, the Russian Writer have been translated into many languages.New trends such as structuralism and Deconstruction have also facilitated translation.