We journey back in time 4,000 years to discover the story of human communication

Translation today is a high-tech, high-speed affair. Businesses as far-flung as New York, Hong Kong, London and Moscow need lightning-fast communication at low rates without sacrificing quality, and the translation industry has experienced a huge boom in technological aids in order to provide it. But how did translation first develop, and how did we get to where we are today? Examining these questions might shed some light on the nature of translation, as well as give us some clues about where translation might go in the future.

Translation: shouting over a great divide

The word translation derives from a Latin phrase, meaning “to carry across”. The earlier ancient Greek term, “metaphrasis” means “to speak across”. In both of these terms there is the sense of a gap, a gulf, and it is this disconnect in human communication that is at the heart of the myth of the Biblical Tower of Babel, in which human speech was shattered in a thousand tongues to punish the united peoples of the earth for their hubris in building a tower to reach the heavens. As long as humans speaking different languages have gathered, the need for someone to reach over the divide and “to carry across” meaning must have been pressing. Anthropologists can only speculate at what point our ancestors first developed language, but it is not hard to imagine these early humans meeting other tribes and needing to break the language barrier in order to trade, intermarry or go to war. More.

See: Translators Family

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.