A short history of translation and translators

In the 16th century

• In the 16th century
• Non-scholarly literature continued to rely heavily on adaptation. Tudor poets and Elizabethan translators adapted themes by Horace, Ovid, Petrarch and others, while inventing a new poetic style. The poets and translators wanted to supply a new audience — created from the rise of a middle class and the development of printing — with “works such as the original authors would have written, had they been writing in England in that day” (Wikipedia).
• The “Tyndale New Testament” (1525) was regarded as the first great Tudor translation, named after William Tyndale, the English scholar who was its main translator. For the first time, the Bible was directly translated from Hebrew and Greek texts. After translating the whole New Testament, Tyndale began translating the Old Testament, and translated half of it. He became a leading figure in the Protestant Reformation before being sentenced to death for the unlicensed possession of the Scripture in English. After his death, one of his assistants completed the translation of the Old Testament. The “Tyndale Bible” became the first mass-produced English translation of the Bible on the printing press.
• Martin Luther, a German professor of theology and a seminal figure in the Protestant Reformation, translated the Bible into German in his later life. The “Luther Bible” (1522-34) had lasting effects on religion. The disparities in the translation of crucial words and passages contributed to some extent to the split of western Christianity into Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. The publication of the “Luther Bible” also contributed to the development of the modern German language.
• Luther was the first European scholar to assess that one translates satisfactorily only towards one’s own language, a bold statement that became the norm two centuries later.