TRANSLATION INDUSTRY UPDATES February 2026

Famous translators throughout time

Translators have often worked in the shadows. At best, they’re frequently seen as a neutral voice for somebody else’s work. At worst, they’ve been forced to work under pseudonyms, silenced for political reasons, and sometimes even threatened with death or killed. Translators throughout history have also had to deal with material challenges and in many cases found themselves forced to combine translation with other occupations in order to make ends meet.

All of this is particularly tragic when we consider that translators have contributed so much to the collective understanding of humanity, bringing amazing literary works to new audiences as well as advancing scientific knowledge and even challenging social norms. In many ways, they are the gatekeepers of the world’s knowledge, which is what makes their work so valuable.

In this month’s translation industry updates we’ll be looking at a selection of notable translators throughout history but they’re by no means representative of all translators everywhere, since they only reflect a small selection of people who are on the historical record and therefore traceable. We hope that the examples here are to some extent representative while acknowledging that they don’t cover every time period or language combination.

Lastly, when half the world’s population is bilingual we should acknowledge that vast numbers of people translate in formal or informal settings or otherwise mediate between cultures and transfer meaning from one culture to another, so we shouldn’t forget the important work of these people either, even if their names aren’t on the historical record.

With all of the above in mind, and in no particular order, here are some famous translators.

Jean-François Champollion (born 1790, died 1832)

One of history’s most iconic translators is the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion, who was instrumental in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphic writing using the Rosetta stone. Building on earlier work by the Englishman Thomas Young, Champollion was the first Egyptologist to realise that hieroglyphics consisted of a mixture of alphabetic, syllabic and determinative signs and he also worked out that the Egyptian hieroglyphic text on the Rosetta stone had been translated from the Greek text, and not the other way around as previous people had thought. Champollion made deciphering hieroglyphics his life’s work and in doing so laid the foundation for the translation of many other Egyptian hieroglyphic texts, helping the world to understand how Ancient Egyptians lived.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Rosetta-Stone

Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Francois-Champollion

Abraham bar Hiyya (born circa 1065, died circa 1136)

Abraham bar Hiyya was a Catalan Jewish philosopher, astronomer and mathematician who wrote a number of original scientific works in Hebrew and also translated scientific work from Arabic into Hebrew and Latin, thus helping to introduce Arabic science to Europe. Some of bar Hiyya’s work was in turn translated for wider audiences, such as his Hebrew-language Treatise on Measurement and Calculation, which was translated into Latin by Plato of Tivoli in 1145 and in turn helped to inspire the work of Fibonacci, who is widely described as ‘the most talented Western mathematician of the middle ages’.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Abraham-bar-Hiyya

Arcadius Avellanus (born 1851, died 1935)

Hungarian classicist Mogyoróssy Arkád, better known as Arcadius Avellanus, was born in Esztergom in 1851 but spent much of his life in America. He was a devoted proponent of ‘living Latin’ and argued in favour of using Latin as an international auxiliary language instead of Esperanto. Avellanus wrote and published a number of original works in Latin and was perhaps best known for editing a Latin-language periodical called Praeco Latinus which ran for eight years in the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century. Avellanus also translated a number of literary works into Latin with these including popular fairytales like Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella, in addition to the complete texts of Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe.

Source: https://linguae.weebly.com/arcadius-avellanus.html

Boris Pasternak (born 1890, died 1960)

A lot of translators past and present have interesting lives outside of their translation work, but possibly none more so than the Russian-born Boris Pasternak, who in addition to being a Nobel-prize-winning poet and novelist also spoke English, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Polish, Ukrainian and Georgian. Pasternak turned his hand to translation after being unable to make a living through writing due to his refusal to extol the virtues of Communism, and he translated a wide variety of texts from a number of source languages, ranging from some of Shakespeare’s works in English to poetry by the Hungarian Sándor Petőfi and the Ukrainian Taras Shevchenko. His friend and lover Olga Ivinskaya (1912–1995) was a fellow translator of literature and poetry into Russian, with her source languages including Czech and Bengali, and in addition to being a brilliant linguistic mind, she inspired Lara’s character in Dr. Zhivago, which Pasternak wrote.

Source: https://dn721607.ca.archive.org/0/items/translators-dictionary/translators-dictionary.pdf

Source: https://dn721602.ca.archive.org/0/items/women-translators/women-translators.pdf

Mary Louise Booth (born 1831, died 1889)

Like many translators, Mary Louise Booth was a multitalented individual, and in addition to translating fairytales she also translated a number of French anti-slavery books into English. At the start of the American Civil War she worked twenty hours a day to translate Agénor de Gasparin’s groundbreaking book Uprising of a Great People, with this causing a sensation when published in English for an American audience. She also translated a number of other works by French anti-slavery politicians and advocates, further advancing the cause for abolitionism. Outside of her political life, Ms. Booth worked as the first editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazar magazine (as it was then known) which increased circulation and influence from then until her death, proving that it’s possible to be successful in both politics and commerce.

Source: https://dn721602.ca.archive.org/0/items/women-translators/women-translators.pdf

Giuseppa Barbapiccola (born 1702, died 1740)

Giuseppa Barbapiccola made an important contribution to advancing intellectual thought by translating Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy from French into Italian with the intention of not only conveying Descartes’ ideas to an Italian audience, but also furthering the cause of women. She argued that Descartes praised the female intellect and she wanted women to read her translation in order to further their education and understanding of philosophy. She also wrote a lengthy preface to her translation in which she defended the right of women to learn, which is all the more impressive considering that her work was published in 1722, when she was only around twenty years old.

Source: https://dn721602.ca.archive.org/0/items/women-translators/women-translators.pdf

Simin Daneshvar (born 1921, died 2012)

Simin Daneshvar was born in Iran and divided her time between there and the US where she stayed as a Fulbright Fellow at Stanford University before returning to her homeland to teach at the University of Tehran. As well as working as a professor, she translated to supplement her income from teaching, with her translations including work by Russian authors such as Chekhov and Gorki as well as literature written in English by authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Saroyan, and the South African author Alan Paton, whose politically-charged anti-apartheid novel Cry, The Beloved Country she translated into Persian. In addition to translating and teaching, she wrote original literary work such as Savushun, the first Persian novel written by a female author. Despite her impressive education she was always inspired by the lives of ordinary Iranian people and her work reflects universal experiences such as childbirth, sickness, death and adultery, proving that the imaginative power of translators can shine a light on collective human experiences.

Source: https://dn721602.ca.archive.org/0/items/women-translators/women-translators.pdf

Dr. Keao NeSmith

Dr. Keao NeSmith is one of a number of contemporary translators who is doing amazing work in creating a body of written material in an indigenous language. While working as a university lecturer in Honolulu, Dr. NeSmith was offered the opportunity to translate Alice In Wonderland into Hawaiian, and from then on he was hooked. Having grown up in a community of Hawaiian language speakers, Dr. NeSmith felt more than capable of rising to the challenge of retelling idiosyncratic English stories in Hawaiian and making those ideas feel relevant to a local audience, which included transforming idioms and cultural references and even creating new words. He then went on to translate a number of other novels into Hawaiian, such as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone. Dr. NeSmith translates for free alongside his day job and is motivated by the intellectual curiosity of translation but also the importance of producing written content that native Hawaiian speakers can read and enjoy, bringing international ideas to a new audience while helping to protect his home language.

Source: https://kawaiola.news/hoonaauao/creating-a-legacy-of-literature-for-the-lahui

This wraps up our run-down of some of the world’s most remarkable translators, but it’s by no means an exhaustive list, so if there are any other translators that we haven’t included, please feel free to tell us about them in the comments.

Happy translating, and see you again for next month’s updates!

Full list of sources:

Britannica

Abraham bar Hiyya

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Abraham-bar-Hiyya

Britannica

Jean-François Champollion

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Francois-Champollion

Britannica

Rosetta Stone

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Rosetta-Stone

International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters