How translations came into being?
Since the beginning of mankind, communication has played and is still playing a crucial role in our evolution- both as individual beings and as a community. Since beliefs and religion were among the first manifestations of spirituality, after meeting the primary needs, the first written texts referred to spiritual events.
According to the Old Testament, languages (multilingualism) arose from the "Tower of Babel" event, when, according to it (Genesis 11:7), God descended and confused the language so that the tower could no longer be built.
It is assumed that the first alphabet is the Sumerian alphabet (millennium 3 BC, although there are recent discoveries that place writing around 5300 BC in the Tartaria area (Romania), which used pre-cuneiform symbols or a proto-writing). From the Sumerians, the Epic of Gilgamesh, which was written at the beginning of the 3rd millennium, was preserved in history, but which was discovered and translated in the 19th century.
Saint Jerome (b. 347–d. 420 AD) was one of the first "official" translators, who translated the Septuagint from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek into Latin.
In the 8th century, due to intense commercial relations, the Arabs became interested in ancient Greek culture, so that they began an intense translation activity of the writings of Hippocrates, Aristotle or Plato, the capital becoming an important world center of this activity. Thus, was born the House of Wisdom, one of the largest libraries in Asia, which included translated documents from the Greek, Chinese and Indian civilizations.
In the 13th century, similarly to the model of the House of Wisdom, Archbishop Raymond de Toledo created the "College of Translators"(Colegio de Traductores), where translation techniques were perfected by thoroughly checking the terminology and restoring existing translations.
In the 14th century, Boccacio's translation of the "Decameron" appears, from Italian to French, which fact was the first translation from a language other than Latin or ancient Greek into French.
In the 15th century, Erasmus of Rotterdam restored the translation of the Bible from Greek to Latin, which would replace the version of the Vulgata Bible made by Saint Jerome.
In 1521, the first document written in the Romanian language appeared: the letter of Neacşu ot Dlăgopole, which contained crucial information about an invasion of the Turks of Ardeal and the Romanian Country.
Şerban Cantacuzino published in 1688 the first full version translation of the Bible, with the support of Nicolae Milescu and Bishop Petru Movilă.
Dimitrie Cantemir wrote "The History of the Rise and Fall of the Empire", a book that was published in London in 1724, being the first to translate into another foreign language.