English translation of Albert Einstein's
Über die spezielle und die allgemeine Relativitätstheorie (Relativity. The Special and General Theory) by Robert W. Lawson (1920 edition).
Title page.
A portrait of Albert Einstein by Hermann Struck reprinted in the book.
From the Preface.
Russian translation of Albert Einstein's Relativitätstheorie (1921).
Cover.
Title page.
Charles Darwin
Beginning of chapter 1.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal (another kind of “translation”)
Cover.
Portrait of Maria Sklodowska-Curie included in the book.
Title page in French.
Translations of religious texts and sacred scriptures
Bible translations
The UIUC Rare Book and Manuscript Library has a copy of the first edition of Biblia Brzeska (the Brest Bible) that was the first complete Protestant (Calvinist) Bible translation into Polish, published in 1563.
Title page.
Biblia święta, tho iest, Księgi Starego y Nowego Zakonu, właśnie z Żydowskiego Greckiego y Łacińskiego, nowo na Polski ięzyk, z pilnością y wiernie wyłożone.
Martin Luther's translation of the Bible. Biblia, das ist: die ganze göttliche heilige Schrift alten und neuen Testaments, nach der deutschen Uebersetzung D. Martin Luthers. The UIUC LIbrary has the Saur edition published in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1776. Contributed by Professor Robert Jenkins, UIUC Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Program in Translation and Interpreting Studies.
Cover.
Title page.
Beginning of Book One.
Dhammapada translations
Contemporary edition that includes the text in Pali and Sanskrit and translations into English, Hindi, and Tibetan.
Cover.
The following is the first sentence of Hittite to be deciphered by a modern translator, a Czech linguist named Bedřich Hrozný. This translation provided the first evidence (not universally accepted for some years after its first publication) that Hittite is an Indo-European language. Hrozný's translation effectively unlocked the world of the Hittites for modern scholars. Hittite is now known to be the oldest Indo-European language attested in written records. The language was spoken in and around the highlands of Bronze Age Anatolia. It was written primarily in clay tablets using cuneiform.
The sentence deciphered by Hrozný appears in Die Keilschrifturkunden aus Boghazköi XIII.4, 2.77, "Instructions for Priests and Temple Personnel". Its English translation: "And you shall eat bread and drink water". Hrozný's translation first appeared in 1915 and then in a fuller publication in 1917, Die Sprache der Hethiter, ihr Bau und ihre Zugehörigkeit zum indogermanischen Sprachstamm (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs).
The attached image includes a photograph of the original tablet containing the cuneiform inscription (hethiter.net/: fotarch N04639, Gerfrid G. W. Müller, 2002-2021). Standardized versions of the cuneiform signs and their transliteration are provided by Shosted and appear below the photograph of the tablet.
Contributed by Professor Ryan Keith Shosted UIUC Department of Linguistics.
The Origins of Totalitarianism is a work that has moved the world in translation. Among many other languages, the book was translated into Serbian in 1998 by Slavica Stojanović and Aleksandra Bajazetov-Vučen. This translation was highly influential in the feminist anti-war movement in Serbia. Contributed by Dana N. Johnson, PhD, Assistant Director of External Fellowships, UIUC Graduate College.
The Origins of Totalitarianism in Serbian translation. Cover.
Havelock Ellis’s and John Addington Symonds’s Sexual Inversion (1897) is a cornerstone of twentieth-century theories of sexuality, and the first sexological manual about homosexuality written in English. What is less widely known is that, due to the panic in Great Britain about homosexuality after the Oscar Wilde trial (held in 1895), this massive work was first published in translation to German as Das Konträre Geschlechtsgefül (1896). The translator, Dr. Hans Kurella, was a physician who was chosen personally by Ellis. Without the German translation, the English-speaking world would probably never have had access to this landmark work. Contributed by Jone Vicente Urrutia, PhD candidate of the department of Spanish and Portuguese.