Some interesting facts about translation history – 1

The history of translation (as distinct from oral interpreting) must have started soon after the development of writing, the expression of language with letters or other marks. The earliest records of writing dates to Egyptian glyphs from about 3400 CE. However, the earliest records of translation do not appear until nearly a thousand years later, as bilingual or even trilingual inscriptions. The earliest of these date back to about 2500 CE in the form of bilingual vocabularies in Sumerian . Some of the tablets recorded financial data, while another group contained ritual and literary texts. A later example is a bilingual Greek-Aramaic inscription from the third century CE with a version of some of Ashoka’s edicts that was found in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Perhaps the best known example of these multilingual inscriptions is the Rosette Stone, which bears a decree issued in 196 BC in three scripts: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic (Egyptian) script and Ancient Greek. The text of the decree is essentially the same in all three scripts, and although slightly earlier bilingual and trilingual inscriptions have been found- The Rosetta Stone was the key to our current understanding of ancient Egyptian culture. It is now held by the British Museum in London.