European Thinking on Secular Translation

This article gives an overview of the evolution of translation studies and practices. Translation for much of its history has existed as a practice without a theory. The history of translation in the Western world is closely bound with the history of religion and propagation of canonical texts, particularly, the Bible. In the bienséance period, a milestone in the study of translation in Britain came in 1791, when the essay on the Principles of Translation, was published. In the romanticism period, literal renderings became the preferred method. In the early twentieth century, in Soviet Russia, there was much innovative experimentation in arts and literature, and literary translators played active role in it. In the late twentieth century, the contemporary European translation theories are seen as a series of paradigms that question the concept of equivalence. Since about the 1950s, there has been an increasing interest in making translation theory appear scientific.