page_title: Translation
section_title: Religious texts
hierarchical_section_title: Translation / Literary translation / Religious texts
caption_attribution_description: English: Quran with Chinese translation recorded in both Arabic and Chinese scripts. فارسی: نسخه‌ای دست‌نویس از یک قرآن با ترجمه به زبان چینی
context_page_description: Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source language text by means of an equivalent target language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction between translating and interpreting; under this distinction, translation can begin only after the appearance of writing within a language community.
  A translator always risks inadvertently introducing source language words, grammar, or syntax into the target language rendering. On the other hand, such "spill-overs" have sometimes imported useful source language calques and loanwords that have enriched target languages. Translators, including early translators of sacred texts, have helped shape the very languages into which they have translated.
  Because of the laboriousness of the translation process, since the 1940s efforts have been made, with varying degrees of success, to automate translation or to mechanically aid the human translator. More recently, the rise of the Internet has fostered a world-wide market for translation services and has facilitated "language localization".
context_section_description: An important role in history has been played by translation of religious texts. Such translations may be influenced by tension between the text and the religious values the translators wish to convey. For example, Buddhist monks who translated the Indian sutras into Chinese occasionally adjusted their translations to better reflect China's distinct culture, emphasizing notions such as filial piety.
  One of the first recorded instances of translation in the West was the 3rd century BCE rendering of some books of the biblical Old Testament from Hebrew into Koine Greek. The translation is known as the "Septuagint", a name that refers to the supposedly seventy translators (seventy-two, in some versions) who were commissioned to translate the Bible at Alexandria, Egypt. According to legend, each translator worked in solitary confinement in his own cell, and, according to legend, all seventy versions proved identical. The Septuagint became the source text for later translations into many languages, including Latin, Coptic, Armenian, and Georgian.
  Still considered one of the greatest translators in history, for having rendered the Bible into Latin, is Jerome (347–420 C.E.), the patron saint of translators. For centuries the Roman Catholic Church used his translation (known as the Vulgate), though even this translation stirred controversy. By contrast with Jerome's contemporary, Augustine of Hippo (354–430 C.E.), who endorsed precise translation, Jerome believed in adaptation, and sometimes invention, in order to more effectively bring across the meaning. Jerome's colorful Vulgate translation of the Bible includes some crucial instances of "overdetermination". For example, Isaiah's prophecy announcing that the Savior will be born of a virgin, uses the word 'almah, which is also used to describe the dancing girls at Solomon's court, and simply means young and nubile. Jerome, writes Marina Warner, translates it as virgo, "adding divine authority to the virulent cult of sexual disgust that shaped Christian moral theology (the [Moslem] Quran, free from this linguistic trap, does not connect Mariam/Mary's miraculous nature with moral horror of sex)." The apple that Eve offered to Adam, according to Mark Polizzotti, could equally well have been an apricot, orange, or banana; but Jerome liked the pun malus/malum (apple/evil).
  Pope Francis has suggested that the phrase "lead us not into temptation", in the Lord's Prayer found in the Gospels of Matthew (the first Gospel, written c. 80–90 C.E.) and Luke (the third Gospel, written c. 80–110 C.E.), should more properly be translated, "do not let us fall into temptation", commenting that God does not lead people into temptation—Satan does. Some important early Christian authors interpreted the Bible's Greek text and Jerome's Latin Vulgate similarly to Pope Francis. A.J.B. Higgins in 1943 showed that among the earliest Christian authors, the understanding and even the text of this devotional verse underwent considerable changes. These ancient writers suggest that, even if the Greek and Latin texts are left unmodified, something like "do not let us fall" could be an acceptable English rendering. Higgins cited Tertullian, the earliest of the Latin Church Fathers (c. 155–c. 240 C.E., "do not allow us to be led") and Cyprian (c. 200–258 C.E., "do not allow us to be led into temptation"). A later author, Ambrose (C. 340–397 C.E.), followed Cyprian's interpretation. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), familiar with Jerome's Latin Vulgate rendering, observed that "many people... say it this way: 'and do not allow us to be led into temptation.'"
  In 863 C.E. the brothers Saints Cyril and Methodius, the Byzantine Empire's "Apostles to the Slavs", began translating parts of the Bible into the Old Church Slavonic language, using the Glagolitic script that they had devised, based on the Greek alphabet.
  The periods preceding and contemporary with the Protestant Reformation saw translations of the Bible into vernacular (local) European languages—a development that contributed to Western Christianity's split into R
caption: Chinese translation, verses 33–34 of Quran's surah (chapter) 36
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