Translation is not a mechanical process where you replace one word with another. Anybody who has tried to translate a literary work will know that the first problem s/he faces is:
How to translate – literally or figuratively? This is perhaps the first debate that arose in this field and continues even today. Actually we find this issue being discussed by the Romans in ancient west. They believed that poets had a moral duty to their society—of educating people and trying to uplift them by presenting good role models through their work. If necessary they had to translate works from other languages (Greek was the only option before them). In this way they would be enriching their own language and vocabulary as well. Naturally the best way to translate was much debated, especially by Cicero and Horace who were themselves translators and wrote about the process. Cicero was one of the first to articulate the translator’s dilemma: “If I render word for word, the result will sound uncouth, and if compelled by necessity I alter anything in the order or wording, I shall seem to have departed from the function of a translator.”
Both Horace and Cicero did not advocate slavish imitation of the source language (SL) text. In this context it should be remembered that most of the educated Romans knew Greek. So translation from Greek into Latin was not for those who did not know the SL, but for those aesthetes who would appreciate the beauty of the process of transformation into Latin. The stress was on enriching Latin rather than on fidelity to the original Greek. That is why Horace advised the translator to invent new words to add to the vocabulary of his language. The primary responsibility of the translator was to the target language (TL) reader and so there was no need to translate word for word. It was enough if they were able to reproduce the spirit of the original SL work. So in this period we see that a certain license in translation was acceptable.
