Nabokov Once Blamed His Translator For His Own Bad Writing
Top 10 Amazing Translation Facts To Make You Think
by Brian Oster
What is history's earliest recorded translation? Which book or website is the most translated in the world? What translations have had the greatest impact on society? If you’ve ever gazed out the window and pondered such questions about translation, join our club!
And look no further, because these translation facts will blow your mind and open your eyes to the amazing world of translation:
History’s First Translation was The Epic of Gilgamesh
First on the list of translation facts is the most ancient: The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest surviving literary work from the human endeavor. The authors wrote in Sumerian, using an ancient cuneiform writing system. Cuneiform writing emerged in Mesopotamia around 2700 BCE.
Translations of Gilgamesh into Asiatic languages are the oldest known translations from one writing system to another. They were translated into Asiatic languages around 2000 BCE.
09. Translation Today is a Nearly $40 Billion Industry
An estimated 300,000 professional translators work in the world today. It’s hard to get an exact count, because many are freelance workers. Some, however, work for one of Earth’s 26,104 commercial language service providers.
Last year’s estimates put the industry’s annual revenue at $40 billion worldwide, and growing fast.
The five most common target languages are:
· German
· French
· Spanish
· English
· Japanese
And the top five origin languages are:
· English
· French
· German
· Russian
· Italian
The World’s Most Translated Website is the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Homepage
You read that right. The most translated website isn't a corporate leader like Apple, whose website serves customers in 128 languages and regional dialects. Nor is it Wikipedia, with its 43 million pages, which you can read in 286 languages.
Or perhaps you thought it might be a world religious leader. The Vatican’s website, however, only translates into nine languages, including English and Latin.
The official website of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, an historically recent American sect, has more than all of these combined. Reports as recent as last year say the Jehovah’s Witnesses website translates into over 780 languages!
At the time of this writing, they list 913 language options on their website. That’s including obscurities like Pennsylvania Dutch, which is a colonial American form of German (not Dutch); Zimbabwe Sign Language; and seven variations of Thai.
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The World’s Most Translated Book is The Bible
With the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ love of languages, it should come as no surprise that their publications are some of the most translated in the world. Their publishing arm, the Watchtower Society, produces immense volumes of books and tracts.
But did you know that of the top ten most translated texts in history, a full seven of them are Watchtower Society publications?
The remaining three in the all time top ten most published works are:
· The Bible: the single most translated text in history, available in 554 languages (although some individual books of the Bible are translated into as many as 2,932 languages)
· The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights: translated into 462 languages
· The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: first published in 1943, it’s the world’s most translated novel, featured in 300 languages. But a drawing of an elephant inside a snake really needs no translation!
The Feast of St. Jerome is International Translation Day
St. Jerome is a celebrated translator from Christian history. He translated the Old Testament into Latin directly from the original Hebrew. His feast day, which marks his death on September 30th, has also become International Translation Day.
05. Gabriel Garcia Marquez Loved the English Translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude
Here’s something you might not expect on a list of translation facts: an author who didn’t have a problem with their translation! Colombian literary giant Gabriel Garcia Marquez admired Gregory Rabassa’s English translation of his novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. So much so, in fact, that he considered it a work of art in itself.
Nabokov Once Blamed His Translator For His Own Bad Writing
Vladimir Nabokov wrote his early novels and novellas, like Camera Obscura, in his mother tongue of Russian. A British translator named Winifred Roy translated Camera Obscura into English.
Nabokov hated the Roy translation. He called it “sloppy” and “full of blunders.” In fact, he went so far as to write his own English version of Camera Obscura, editing it heavily and retitling it Laughter in the Dark. But the poor quality may not have been the translator’s fault, after all.
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In 2015, journalist and Nabokov scholar John Colapinto uncovered Nabokov’s original draft of Camera Obscura, and said it was so bad--and heavily marked up in Nabokov’s own handwriting--that it showed Nabokov “was indeed capable of writing a second-rate novel. (He knew it, and rewrote it.)”
03. A Single Translation Mistake Cost a Multinational Bank $10 Million
In 2009, British multinational bank HSBC launched a marketing campaign under the slogan “Assume Nothing.” However, there was a failure to localize for foreign markets. The slogan translated in many languages to “Do Nothing.”
The mistake lead to an embarrassing scramble for the global financial leader. It cost them $10 million to do some emergency rebranding in the hopes of saving their image.
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