Translation enables immediate and long-term contact between people. Wherever there is a language barrier - from two friends speaking different languages to the Internet - translation helps to overcome it.
Translation facilitates the exchange of information of all kinds, and this exchange is the basis of human progress.
Over the centuries, translation has contributed to the development and affirmation of the humanitarian values that modern man emphasises: tolerance, mutual assistance, support for the weak, striving for improvement, and environmental protection. At all times, translation has served the most urgent needs of humankind: in antiquity it contributed to the continuity of Greek and Roman cultures, in the Middle Ages to the spread of Christianity, and in all subsequent centuries to the mutual enrichment of the arts, sciences, literatures, material and everyday culture of the various peoples of the world. Thanks to translation we know Shakespeare, Goethe, Dante, translation has formalised the achievements of foreign cultures.
Children's literature, international from the first years of its existence, was formed on the basis of translations.
Translation has performed its most important function since ancient times, but it was not until the 20th century that people came to realise its importance and its special place. It is not by chance that the 20th century was proclaimed in 1955 in the first issue of Babel magazine as the century of translation. Scholars from different countries note the special role of translation in the formation of national cultures.
A modern person uses the results of a translator's work when he reads the instructions for a foreign-made washing machine, when he learns on TV about what is written in French newspapers, when he needs to negotiate with a foreign partner, when he reads an interesting novel. To this we can also add the work of past translators, because we read the Bible and many works of fiction in old translations.
The trend towards globalisation, which is observed at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries, is prepared by the dedicated work of translators, and globalisation itself is possible only if the translation process is well organised.
The translators' labour contributes to the openness of society. Today, the greatest need for translators is in technical fields, with more than 70 per cent of the world's translators working in these fields. According to the London Computer Integrated Translation GmbH in 1987, the volume of translation in the world was 200 million pages per year, and the need for translation was increasing by 15 per cent per year. The same trend, with a slight increase, has continued in recent years. The largest volume of texts translated is business correspondence, followed by consumer information texts of various kinds (instructions, brochures, etc.), then scientific and technical texts, contractual texts, technical descriptions...
Speaking of the importance of translation, we immediately mentioned its " overcoming" function. After all, it helps people to get closer to each other, to understand each other. What is overcome in this process?
It has long been clear that translation helps to overcome language and cultural barriers. Let's try to understand where these barriers come from and how to overcome them.
Language barriers exist because humankind is historically multilingual. Modern researchers estimate that the number of living languages in the world ranges from 2500 to 5000. There are more than a thousand Indian languages, about a thousand African languages; on the islands of New Guinea alone there are more than 700 different languages. It is true that the bulk of languages are languages with very few speakers
The languages spoken by 95 per cent of the world's population are less than 100. And yet, if we even hypothetically imagine that every inhabitant of the planet might need to communicate with representatives of each of the world's languages, the number of language barriers would be unusually high.
As a rule, people speak one or two foreign languages, but they may need information in 3-10 more languages. Moreover, in most cases knowledge of 1-2 foreign languages does not mean full bilingualism, they know a foreign language less well and not in full.
Representatives of the so-called "small" languages, i.e. languages with a small number of speakers, have the hardest time; they most often have to rely on translations. The most popular way for speakers of small languages to reach international cultural contact is through bilingualism. The foreign language in which speakers of small languages write scientific works and even plays and novels is usually one of the "large" languages with a large number of speakers: English, German, French, Spanish.
The experience of using an intermediary language for cultural contacts is not new. For a long time Latin was the language of ecclesiastical and then secular scientific unity. From the end of the XVIII century French became the language of secular communication; up to the beginning of the XX century it retained the functions of the language of diplomacy, and French retained the functions of the language of international mail until the middle of the XX century. Now English is absolutely leading. In recent years, it has displaced even the native languages Swedish and Danish in their homelands, Sweden and Denmark.
The rush to overcome language barriers contributes to the decline in the number of speakers of small languages, such as Frisian and Faroese in Europe, and complicates the task of those concerned with the preservation of the cultural phenomenon of small languages.
At different times, humankind has also made attempts to create an synthetic common language that would not be burdened with the specifics of any one culture. The most successful of such attempts, perhaps, should be recognised as the creation of the international artificially artificial language Esperanto, which was developed by the Warsaw doctor L.L. Zamenhof in 1887. Currently, according to the data of the General Esperanto Association, this language is spoken by about 8 million people in the world. But, apparently, it is Esperanto's artificial isolation from the cultural roots of living languages that has prevented it from becoming a world language. At the same time, the attempts of scientists to create a unified, non-national system of information encoding similar to living languages or using the principles of living languages continue today, but none of them has ever seriously competed with translation. So far, we have discussed overcoming language barriers through both translations and intermediary languages. Overcoming cultural barriers is a much more complex problem. Translation plays a leading role in this process. However, the specific, age-old differences in everyday and spiritual cultures cannot be fully perceived by other peoples, and only an approximation of the specifics of a foreign culture is possible.
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