Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text.

Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature; there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 2000 BCE) into Southwest Asian languages of the second millennium BCE. Translators always risk inappropriate spill-over of source-language idiom and usage into the target-language translation. On the other hand, spill-overs have imported useful source-language calques and loanwords that have enriched the target languages. Indeed, translators have helped substantially to shape the languages into which they have translated. Due to the demands of business documentation consequent to the Industrial Revolution that began in the mid-18th century, some translation specialties have become formalized, with dedicated schools and professional associations. Because of the laboriousness of translation, since the 1940s engineers have sought to automate translation (machine translation) or to mechanically aid the human translator (computer-assisted translation). The rise of the Internet has fostered a world-wide market for translation services and has facilitated language localization. Translation studies deal with the systematic study of the theory, the description and the application of translation. Translation as an activity exists at least since mankind started developing trade millennia ago; so, if we include interpreting, it is no exaggeration to say that the origins of language industry are older than those of written language. History The first patents for translating machines were applied for in the mid-1930s, but research into translation technology kicked off for real in 1954 with the Georgetown Experiment. This involved fully automated translation of more than 60 Russian sentences into English, and proved to be a huge success with the American scientific community. The success led to more funding from the US government. Researchers optimistically claimed that the problem of language barriers would be resolved within three to five years.

The publication of the ALPAC (Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee) Report in 1966 put paid to those heady aspirations. The report concluded that machine translations were less accurate, slower, and more expensive than human translation. Even though the ALPAC Report did suggest that tools to help translators, like automatic dictionaries, should be developed, the publication of the study meant that the US abandoned their translation technology program for over a decade. This ensured that the 1970s was a relatively slow month for the progression of translation technologies. But significantly, universities began researching into the concept of translation memory storing human translations for re-use. As languages change, texts in an earlier version of a language either original texts or old translations may be difficult for more modern readers to understand. Texts may thus be translated into more modern language, called a modern translation (sometimes modern English translation or modernized translation). Modern language industry has developed rapidly following availability of the internet. Achievements of the industry include the ability to quickly translate long texts into many languages. This has created new challenges as compared with the traditional activity of translators, such as that of quality assurance. There are some quality standards such as EN 15038 in Europe and ASTM F2575-06 in the USA. This is particularly done either for literature from classical languages (such as Latin or Greek), most prominently the Bible (see Modern English Bible translations), or for literature from an earlier stage of the same language, such as the works of William Shakespeare (which is largely understandable to a modern audience, but presents some difficulties), or The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer (which is not generally understandable to modern readers). Modern translation is applicable to any language with a long literary history; for example in Japanese, The Tale of Genji (11th century) is generally read in modern translation see Genji: modern readership. Modern translation often involves literary scholarship and textual revisions, as there is frequently not a single canonical text. This is particularly noteworthy in the case of the Bible and Shakespeare, where modern scholarship can result in significant changes to the

text. Modern translation meets with opposition from some traditionalists; in English this is most significant in some people preferring the Authorized King James Version of the Bible to modern translations, and to reading Shakespeare in the original (c. 1600) text, rather than in modern translation. An opposite process is found in translating modern literature into classical language, particularly for the goal of extensive reading see List of Latin translations of modern literature for examples. There are language industry companies of different sizes; none of them is dominant in the world market so far. There are human resources in translation of very different levels; internet has gathered professional translators, students, language teachers and professionals from other disciplines, all of them offering translation services. It is extremely easy to offer translation services online. All one needs is a website and access to a translator database, which has created an insurgence of new small translation agencies all over the world. This, in turn, has made it very difficult to buy translation services as all these tens of thousands of translation agencies offer a practically identical service offering. All one has to do is search for translation companies online to see how similar these different options actually are. To drill down to the language and industry expertise that are needed, consumers and business users alike can use tools like Translizer to do a precision search based on competencies rather than just "translation". This development has made it much easier to avoid the common pitfalls of buying translations. One field of research in the industry includes the possibility of machine translation fully replacing human translation.