Words or meaning?

Abstract - In the following pages, a brief, personal outline of the history of translation is sketched, so as to determine the whys and wherefores of the form/content dichotomy that seems to be plaguing translators and translation theorists incessantly. From the outset, in Classical times, sense rules supreme. In the late middle ages with the advent of Bible translation in Europe, the word – being the word of God – assumes new-found importance, especially as any deviation from it implies heresy. With Neo-Classicism and the Age of Enlightenment, the original tenets of antiquity unsurprisingly make their comeback, though somewhat short-lived this time. With the Romantics and post-Romantics, foreign lands and cultures gain ever greater interest, as indeed do their various forms of expressions. In contemporary Europe, over the last hundred years or so, with its preoccupation for markets and product diversification, the two schools of thought seem to co-habit quite comfortably, notwithstanding modern linguistic theory that renders form and content into indivisible components of language, thus making the dichotomy fatuous.