HISTORY OF TRANSLATION

History
Main article: History of the English language
English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlers and Roman auxiliary troops from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the Northern Netherlands. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms of England. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually came to dominate. The original Old English language was then influenced by two waves of invasion. The first was by language speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family; they conquered and colonized parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries. The second was the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman. These two invasions caused English to become "mixed" to some degree (though it was never a truly mixed language in the strict linguistic sense of the word; mixed languages arise from the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who develop a hybrid tongue for basic communication).
Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical supplementation of the Anglo-Frisian core of English; the later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Italic branch of the European languages. This Norman influence entered English largely through the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language of great flexibility and with a huge vocabulary.

Rosetta Stone
Etymologically, "translation" is a "carrying across" or "bringing across." The Latin "translatio" derives from the perfect passive participle, "translatum," of "transferre" ("to transfer" — from "trans," "across" + "ferre," "to carry" or "to bring"). The modern Romance, Germanic and Slavic European languages have generally formed their own equivalent terms for this concept after the Latin model — after "transferre" or after the kindred "traducere" ("to bring across" or "to lead across").
Additionally, the Greek term for "translation," "metaphrasis" ("a speaking across"), has supplied English with "metaphrase" (a "literal translation," or "word-for-word" translation)—as contrasted with "paraphrase" ("a saying in other words," from the Greek "paraphrasis")."Metaphrase" corresponds, in one of the more recent terminologies, to "formal equivalence," and "paraphrase", to "dynamic equivalence

Translation is the interpreting of the meaning of a text and the subsequent production of an equivalent text, likewise called a "translation," that communicates the same message in another language. The text to be translated is called the "source text," and the language that it is to be translated into is called the "target language"; the final product is sometimes called target text Translation must take into account constraints that include context, the rules of grammar of the two languages, their writing conventions, and their idioms. A common misconception is that there exists a simple word-for-word correspondence between any two languages, and that translation is a straightforward mechanical process. A word-for-word translation, however, does not take into account context, grammar, conventions, and idioms.