Microsoft Word Revised Syllabus Ver doc

The 18
th
 Century 
Dr.Johnson (1709-84), in his Life of Pope (1779-80), discussing the question of 
additions to a text through translation, comments that if elegance is gained, surely it is 
desirable, provided nothing is taken away, and goes on to state that ‘the purpose of a writer is 
to be read’, claiming that Pope wrote for his own time and his own nation. The right of the 
individual to be addressed in his own terms, on his own ground is an important element in 
eighteenth-century translation and is linked to changing concepts of ’originality’. 
Goethe (1749-1832) argued that every literature must pass through three phases of 
translation, although as the phases are recurrent all may be found taking place within the 
same language system at the same time. The first epoch ‘acquaints us with foreign countries 
on our own terms’, and Goethe cites Luther’s German Bible as an example of this tendency. 
The second mode is that of appropriation through substitution and reproduction, where the 
translator absorbs the sense of a foreign work but reproduces it in his own terms, and here 
Goethe cites Wieland and the French tradition of translating (a tradition much disparaged by 
German theorists). The third mode, which he considers the highest, is one which aims for 
perfect identity between the SL text and the TL text, and the achieving of this mode must be 
through the creation of a new ‘manner’ which fuses the uniqueness of the original with a new 
form and structure. 

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24 
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, in 1791, Alexander Fraser Tytler 
published a volume entitled The Principles of Translation, the first systematic study in 
English-of the translation processes. Tytler set up three basic principles: 
1.
The translation should give a complete transcript of the idea of the original work. 
2.
The style and manner of writing should be of the same character with that of the 
original 
3.
The translation should have all the ease of the original composition. 
Tytler reacts against Dryden’s influence, maintaining that the concept of ‘paraphrase’ 
had led to exaggeratedly loose translation, although he agrees that part of the translator’s duty 
is to clarify obscurities in the original, even where this entails omission or addition.
 Translation theory from Dryden to Tytler, then, is concerned with the problem of 
recreating an essential spirit, soul or nature of the work of art.