Translator in 1140: Gerard of Cremona at Toledo

The profession that carries meaning between languages — from the Septuagint and Jerome's Vulgate to Toledo, Nuremberg's booths and the machine-translation age. "Translation" comes from the Latin translatio, "a carrying across" — and people have been paid to carry meaning across languages for as long as writing exists. The oldest surviving bilingual dictionaries are Sumerian–Eblaite word lists on clay tablets from Ebla, in modern Syria, around 2300 BCE, and Old Kingdom Egyptian princes at Elephantine already bore the official title "overseer of interpreters." Wherever empires, faiths and trade routes crossed a language line, someone stood in the gap.

The modern trade is quieter but structurally the same: read a text in one language, write it again in another so well that nothing important is lost and nothing false is added. Most translators today work freelance, into their native language only, from one or two source languages mastered over years. A degree helps and is common, but the real gates are elsewhere — agency test translations, certification exams with pass rates below 20 percent, and sworn-translator lists controlled by courts and ministries.

This page follows the profession from the Septuagint's seventy-two legendary scholars and Jerome's Vulgate through Baghdad's House of Wisdom, Toledo, Luther's eleven-week New Testament and the two irreconcilable versions of the Treaty of Waitangi, to the Georgetown–IBM experiment of 1954 and the neural machine translation that now drafts most of the world's commercial words. It also gives the honest answer to the question every young linguist asks: how much of this job survives the machine.