The global dynamics has brought us to the rapid growth of various community’s needs, covering a number of sectors, such as business, trade, socio-economy, education, and politics. Together with the rapid development, people-to-people interaction is considered as the key element in generating trend in the promotion of certain innovations globally.
The Role of Translation in Global Dynamics
This regards to the extent of how a business could progress and how a Nation’s development could be achieved, and above its all: how to make what’s far becomes near; undeniably places communication as an essential measure. This is the underlying idea that all people embrace.
In response to the condition, translation has made our world so much easier seamlessly. It is a miracle, if we might say, born as the one and only sophisticated ideology that ignores racism and even benefits the diverse socio-cultural aspects as the primary asset for collaboration and development.
With such a refined understanding, translation, since the very first place, has founded a belief related to the humanly features, such as language as the unifying element in proceeding to the form of advanced communication for various purposes.
To sum up, translation should not be perceived as a mere branch of linguistics but an extensive discipline with many branches of significant results. It is far beyond a concept of knowledge, it is a means that unifies the diversity of cultures.
Then, how did translation take its first step prior to its appearance as a globally vital trend in a cross-way communication? How could it become an essential growing industry in China, Korea, Japan, Indonesia, and many other countries in the part of the globe?
Historical Origins of Translation
It is believed that translation was firstly introduced in the Mesopotamian epoch when the Sumerian sonnet Gilgamesh was converted into Asian dialects. It went back to around the second millennium BC. Other ancient translated works consist of the translation of Indian documents into Chinese carried out by Buddhist monks. In later periods, Ancient Greek texts were also translated by Roman poets and were adapted to create developed literary works for entertainment.
It has been a long debate that the information of Greek scholastics was created on account of the interpretation work of Arabic scholars. At the point when the Greeks were vanquished, their works were taken in by Arabic scholars who interpreted them and made their own adaptations of the logical, diversion, and philosophical understandings.
These Arabic renditions were later converted into Latin, during the Medieval times, for the most part all through Spain and the subsequent works gave the establishments of Renaissance scholastics.
Translation’s Role in Religious Manuscripts
Translation then grew significantly due to the needs of religious manuscripts and spiritual texts dissemination. As religion existed, people started to consider the availability of religious scripts in various languages. With regards to the idea, the Old Testament became the first religious script that was translated into Greek in around the third century BC through the reference to Septuagint, which was the Hebrew bible translation in Greek and well-known as the Greek Old Testament.
With the limited instruments and tools, no less than 70 scholars painstakingly worked on the script translation into Greek. The product was later acknowledged as the basis of the future principle for biblical translation.
It is far beyond imagination on how hard our past people worked on the popularization of translation. Not to mention due to the limited access to the technological invention that quite took time, the limited direct language pairs was also considered as a hindrance, resulting in the inconsistency among translators.
Evolution of Translation with Technological Advancements
Thanks to the invention of computers that had contributed to a massive disruption since the late 20th century in many life sectors, including language processing. Regardless of the less balanced machine capability in comparison to human’s natural language talents, the presence of technologies has facilitated the justification od perception among translators through a seamless discussion network that leads them to concur the same consensus.
Now, the 21st century is appearing with its brighter and more vivid charm through the massive intervention of technologies to the language field. Translation is now accessible not only for certain momentarily purposes but also for anyone in any part of the world that requires it to assist them in grasping particular knowledge. Humans and computers are positioned as bound partners in doing this task, making translation appear as a victorious industry. It even has been evolving in a high peak of development through the initiation of at least four types of machine translations, including Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), Rule-based Machine Translation (RBMT), Hybrid Machine Translation, and Neural Machine Translation. Through this bond, just say it like: human has ideas, while computer has its system – they both are inseparable.
Will it stop? Will this century become the last peak for translation to develop? It’s a big NO.
As people, language also grows. It evolves around time to time, in adjustment with the trend – and translation itself is a trend!
Neither of those ancient Buddhist monks nor Arabic scholars ever predicted the birth of Google Translate a couple of centuries after their era of life. It is not likely to buy a pig in a poke to predict the survival of the translation industry a decade later or even a century later. Tremendous advances in all fields take place all throughout the world and are recorded in hundreds of different languages.
Much of the data is accessible on the web. Then, Semantic Web appears as a huge language sharing system, which allows professional translators to search and retrieve information universally, despite the search language or the language of the information.
The Present and Future of Translation Industry
The idea is still some way off as there are over 6,800 languages in the world and many use different scripts. With this gigantic database, it is not impossible for the industry to create other trending branches through meticulous research and development efforts. Perhaps, it will appear in the form of advanced robotic techs that share similar analytical capabilities as humans do. As for in Indonesia, in which the translation industry is still limited with only a few people who are attracted to be involved, we are freely allowed to make our future expectation too.
Together with the globally rapid development and borderless communication that appears as an alternative way for people to engage, we are optimistic to have more professionals in this sector and more advanced fields for its functional use.
Who knows? We just need to do our job now: evolve with the development!
One thing is clear, that it will never stop only in this place, but thrive along with the time.
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