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Translation As An Easy Task Essay

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Taduttore Traditore

Translation is often portrayed as being an easy task, a simple transfer of words and sentences from a language to another. Because some people are bilingual or polyglots it doesn’t mean they can be translators. Translation is a very hard and difficult task to accomplish. In this essay, the focus will be on the maxim “Taduttore Traditore” (from the Italian”to translate is to betray”), trying to understand and analyse its meanings and implications. And then, try to consider whether it is or not an accurate statement regarding translation work.
According to the Bible, before the Tower of Babel, everyone spoke one language. Yet because mankind decided to build a tower that would reach the Heavens, God punished his people by making them speak different languages and by splitting them into different parts of the world. That is when translation begins.
At that time, there was no internet, no computers, no automatic translations nor even bilingual dictionaries. Nowadays, with the growth of the technologies, access to nearly every kind of information is possible. The translator’s task is facilitated thanks to the many tools that the new technologies can provide such as MA Tools like Linguee, Reverso, Word Reference, Bab.la and many more. Although they are not one hundred percent accurate, they are a great assistance for a translator, especially for a word by word translation. Yet translated expressions or sentences are still very hard to deal with for a computer

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