Jerome of Stridon lived in the 4th and 5th centuries. He is one of the Catholic saints and a patron saint of translators. Today is the day when he is remembered and the International Translators Day.
St. Jerome, author of Vulgate
Jerome was the first person in history who translated the Bible from Greek and Aramaic into Latin. This translation was called Wulgata and it took 24 years to prepare it. It should be remembered that the translation process was long and carried out without tools, which are now considered fundamental. Nowadays, tools like dictionaries and CAT tools allow us to translate even the longest texts with the highest quality and consistency in time much shorter than Jerome’s case.
Its first recipients criticized Vulgate. The author was accused of straying too far from Septuaginta, the first translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek. Vulgate aimed at standardizing the Biblical texts and propagating them in Europe. This resulted in spreading Christian ideas. During the Middle Ages, Wulgata was significantly altered and it is now impossible to reconstruct its original form. Therefore, we cannot read the first version of Vulgate. Performing such a substantial translation with scarcely any help which translators had at their disposal at that time was quite an accomplishment.
The history of translation
Throughout the following centuries, translation existed and developed in the shadow of other branches of science and art. Although new translations appeared, none of them was as famous as Wulgata by St. Jerome. Translation obtained the status of a separate branch of science only in the middle of the 20th century. With the popularization of computers and access to the Internet, it started developing freely and obtaining the form we see today. The web allows us to provide services to clients worldwide and cooperate with the best translators, no matter where they live. Due to this fact, we can offer translation not only to the most popular European languages such as Dutch, Italian, or Swedish but also to more exotic ones, like Indonesian, Thai, or Japanese. Language pairs offered for translation also changed significantly. It is no longer a Greek to Latin translation. Although English and German remain the most popular source language, they are no limits to the possibilities. Nowadays, we can provide translation in any language pair.
However, St. Jerome’s achievement still instils respect. Wulgata’s author became the patron saint of translators and his day – September 30th – was announced the International Translators Day.
Happy International Translators Day!
On this special occasion, the MD Online team would like to extend cordial wished to the translators. We wish you the passion for translating, exciting texts and no words hiding at the tip of the tongue.
We wish our clients fruitful and satisfying cooperation with us.
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