18 famous translators throughout history — and what made them great

Throughout history, translators have done more than convert words from one language to another. They have shaped religions, sparked revolutions, built literatures, and transmitted knowledge across civilizations. The transmission of Greek philosophy to the Islamic world, the spread of Buddhism across East Asia, the Reformation, the European Renaissance, and the emergence of national literatures in dozens of languages — all of these transformative movements depended on translators whose names are far less well known than the ideas they carried.

Translation can serve many purposes. It facilitates commerce, spreads philosophy and religion, preserves knowledge from extinct civilizations, and builds cultural understanding across linguistic boundaries. The history of translation stretches back at least 4,500 years — to clay tablets in Sumerian and Eblaite, and to the Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh.

One thread that runs through much of translation history is worth noting at the outset: the historical record is dominated by men, not because women were absent from translation (they were not) but because their work was frequently uncredited, anonymous, or attributed to male patrons and supervisors. Women now make up approximately 71% of professional translators and interpreters worldwide, yet they are significantly underrepresented in lists of historical figures. This guide attempts to redress that imbalance in its contemporary section.

In this guide:

1. What makes a translator historically significant?
2. Classical antiquity (8th century BC – 5th century AD)
3. Late antiquity (5th – 7th century)
4. The Middle Ages (8th – 15th century)
5. Early modern period (1500s – 1800s)
6. Late modern period (1800s – 1945)
7. Contemporary translators (1945 – present)
8. Frequently asked questions

What makes a translator historically significant?

Three broad criteria tend to define the translators remembered by history:

Impact on the receiving culture. Did the translation transform the intellectual, religious, or cultural landscape of the language it entered? St Jerome's Vulgate shaped Christianity for a millennium. Martin Luther's German Bible standardized a national language. Gregory Rabassa's One Hundred Years of Solitude introduced a new literary idiom to the English-speaking world.

Methodological influence. Did the translator advance the craft itself — establishing principles, techniques, or debates that practitioners still reference? Cicero's advocacy for sense-for-sense translation over word-for-word laid the groundwork for all subsequent translation theory. Eugene Nida's formal vs. dynamic equivalence distinction (covered in the Tomedes history of translation) codified the debate for the modern era.

Access created. Did the translation bring a work, a tradition, or a body of knowledge to audiences who would otherwise have had none? Constance Garnett's 71 volumes of Russian literature gave English readers access to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov. Edward Seidensticker's translations of Japanese fiction helped Yasunari Kawabata win the Nobel Prize.

Classical antiquity (8th century BC – 5th century AD)

1. Cicero (106–43 BC)

Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, orator, philosopher — and a translator whose methodological contribution to the craft outlasted his political career. Cicero translated key works of Greek philosophy into Latin, making Stoic and Epicurean thought available to Roman audiences. But his more lasting contribution was theoretical: in De optimo genere oratorum, Cicero argued explicitly for translating sense-for-sense rather than word-for-word — rendering the meaning and force of the original rather than its literal words. This principle, which St Jerome would later adopt for Biblical translation and which remains central to translation theory today, was first articulated by a Roman politician who translated as a sideline.

2. St Jerome (347–420 AD)

St Jerome is perhaps the most consequential individual translator in Western history. His Latin Vulgate (a translation of the Bible from Greek and Hebrew) became the official Catholic Bible and the only translation in widespread use for over a millennium. Jerome adopted Cicero's sense-for-sense principle, arguing that a translator should render meaning, not mirror words — an approach he articulated in his letter De optimo genere interpretandi (On the Best Kind of Translator). He is the patron saint of translation. The Vulgate shaped not only Catholic theology but the Latin language itself, embedding Biblical vocabulary into the language of European scholarship for a thousand years.

Late antiquity (5th – 7th century)

3. Kumārajīva (344–413 AD)

Buddhist monk, missionary, and scholar Kumārajīva is widely regarded as one of the most important translators in the history of Chinese Buddhism. He led a team that translated over 300 volumes of Sanskrit Buddhist texts into Chinese — including the Diamond Sutra, the Lotus Sutra, and the Amitabha Sutra. His translations were celebrated not just for their accuracy but for their literary quality: he reportedly revised drafts multiple times for both precision and elegance. He also founded the Madhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy (Sanlun) in China, making him simultaneously a translator and a theological innovator.

4. Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809–873)

During the Abbasid Caliphate's translation movement (arguably the largest state-sponsored translation effort in human history), Hunayn ibn Ishaq stood out among hundreds of translators as the most prolific and respected. Known as "the Sheikh of the translators," he worked from his base in Baghdad and translated 116 scientific and medical treatises from Greek into Arabic and Syriac, fluent in all four languages — Greek, Syriac, Persian, and Arabic. He also wrote 36 original works of his own, 21 of them on medicine. His translations of Galen and Hippocrates shaped Islamic medicine for centuries and, through later transmission into Latin, shaped European medicine as well.

The Middle Ages (8th – 15th century)

5. Notker Labeo (c. 950–1022)

Benedictine scholar Notker Labeo (also known as Notker the German) worked at the Abbey of St Gall in Switzerland. He translated at least 11 major works from Latin into Old High German, including Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy and two works of Aristotle. His significance lies not just in the works he translated but in the method: he developed a systematic approach to German vocabulary, coining new German terms where Latin concepts had no equivalent, and laying foundations for German as a language of intellectual discourse.

6. Raymond de Toledo (c. 1080–1151)

Archbishop Raymond de Toledo established and funded what became the Toledo School of Translators — a collaborative translation enterprise in which Christian, Muslim, and Jewish scholars worked together in the Cathedral of Toledo to translate Arabic scientific, philosophical, and mathematical texts into Latin. The school's output transmitted the Greek intellectual tradition (filtered through Arabic) back into the Latin-reading world of Western Europe. The translations of Aristotle produced there were decisive for the development of European Scholasticism.

7. Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400)

Known primarily as the author of The Canterbury Tales and the "father of English literature," Chaucer was also a talented translator whose work shaped the English language during its formative period. He translated Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy from Latin and Guillaume de Lorris's The Romance of the Rose from French, and his adaptations of Italian works by Boccaccio helped establish Italian narrative traditions in English literature. At a time when Latin and French dominated formal English intellectual life, Chaucer's translations demonstrated that English could carry serious ideas.

Early modern period (1500s – 1800s)

8. Martin Luther (1483–1546)

Martin Luther's translation of the Bible into German (1522–1534) was one of the most politically and culturally transformative translation acts in history. By making the Bible available in the vernacular rather than Latin, Luther gave ordinary German speakers direct access to the Scriptures without clerical mediation — a foundational move of the Protestant Reformation. His translation also had a lasting linguistic impact: by insisting on natural spoken German rather than scholarly Latin or regional dialect, Luther's Bible helped standardize High German as a written language.

9. William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536)

William Tyndale's translation of the New Testament into English (worked directly from the Greek rather than the Latin Vulgate) was so threatening to the established Church that Tyndale was arrested, tried for heresy, and executed by strangulation and burning in 1536. His dying prayer was reportedly: "Lord, open the King of England's eyes." Within years, Henry VIII ordered English Bibles placed in every parish church. Tyndale has no grave; his monument is the language: approximately 84% of the King James Bible (1611) is Tyndale's translation, revised and updated. Phrases like "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak," "let there be light," and "the salt of the earth" are Tyndale's English.

10. Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832)

Champollion's work occupies a unique category in translation history: he did not translate a living text but decoded a dead script. Using the Rosetta Stone (which carried the same decree in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, Demotic script, and Ancient Greek), Champollion published his decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1822, opening fourteen centuries of silence in Egyptian written history. He spoke Arabic, Ancient Greek, Coptic, Hebrew, and Latin, and used his knowledge of Coptic (the latest form of the Egyptian language) to understand how hieroglyphics represented sounds. His work unlocked an entire civilization's written record.

Late modern period (1800s – 1945)

11. Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is best known for his philosophical fiction, but translation was a practice he began at nine years old — reportedly rendering Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince into Spanish while still a child. As an adult, he translated works by Kafka, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Whitman, Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, and André Gide for Spanish readers, applying what he described as a principle of "happy and creative infidelity" — the belief that overly literal translation kills the spirit of a text. His approach to translation as creative re-reading influenced generations of Latin American writers and translators.

12. Constance Garnett (1861–1946)

Constance Garnett translated 71 volumes of Russian literature into English, introducing Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev, and Goncharov to English-speaking audiences who had had virtually no access to them before. Her output over five decades was extraordinary by any measure. She was not without critics (Vladimir Nabokov objected to her tendency to omit phrases she found unclear, and later translators have revisited several works she pioneered) but her foundational role in building Western understanding of Russian literature is undisputed. The Los Angeles Review of Books has noted that not since Garnett translated the Russian greats has any single translator generated the kind of cult following that Lydia Davis enjoys today.

13. Sir Richard Burton (1821–1890)

Described by Wikipedia as an "English explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer, and diplomat," Sir Richard Burton brought to English translation the same appetite for the transgressive that marked his explorations. He produced the first English translation of the Kama Sutra and an uncensored version of One Thousand and One Nights, deliberately challenging Victorian prudery through the vehicle of translation. His work demonstrated that translation could itself be a political and cultural act, not merely a service.

Contemporary translators (1945 – present)

14. Gregory Rabassa (1922–2016)

American translator Gregory Rabassa's greatest achievement was giving the English-speaking world access to the literary explosion known as the Latin American Boom. His translations of Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Jorge Amado defined how English readers experienced a generation of writers. García Márquez famously said he preferred Rabassa's English translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude to his own Spanish original, a tribute that required three years of waiting for Rabassa to finish the manuscript before García Márquez would authorize any other language editions.

15. Edward George Seidensticker (1921–2007)

Edward Seidensticker's translations of Japanese fiction were instrumental in building the Western readership that allowed Japanese literature to achieve global recognition. He translated Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, and Jun'ichirō Tanizaki — and his translation of Kawabata's work is widely credited with helping secure Kawabata's Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, the first Nobel awarded to a Japanese author. Seidensticker also translated The Tale of Genji, the 11th-century Japanese novel often cited as the world's first novel, in a version that remains widely read.

16. Lydia Davis (born 1947)

Lydia Davis occupies a dual role in contemporary letters as both a celebrated fiction writer and one of the most respected translators from French in the English-speaking world. Her translations of Proust's Swann's Way (2003) and Flaubert's Madame Bovary (2010) both won the French-American Foundation's Annual Translation Prize and were described by critics as definitive rereadings of canonical texts. In 2013 she won the Man Booker International Prize for her fiction, and she has been appointed Chevalier and Officier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. The Los Angeles Review of Books described her as generating the kind of translator cult following not seen since Constance Garnett a century before.

Davis's approach reflects a translator's sensibility applied to her own original fiction: extreme attention to sentence rhythm, a refusal of paraphrase, and the belief that the most precise language is usually also the most economical.

17. Emily Wilson (born 1971)

Emily Wilson, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, became in 2017 the first woman in history to publish a complete English translation of Homer's Odyssey — more than three millennia after the poem's composition, and more than 400 years after the first English translation by a man. Her translation was described as a "cultural landmark" by The Guardian and received positive reviews in the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Vox, and NPR. She received a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" of $625,000 in 2019.

Wilson's translation made specific, deliberate choices that departed from the tradition: rendering the opening word andra (man) as "a man" rather than "the man," using iambic pentameter to match Homer's dactylic hexameter in English equivalence, and refusing the euphemistic language some predecessors had used to describe enslaved people and women in the text. Her work prompted a wider conversation about who translates canonical texts and what assumptions those translators bring.

Since more than 60 scholars (all of them male) had translated the Odyssey before her, Wilson's translation also made visible the gender dynamics of translation history that this article's introduction acknowledged.

18. Eliot Weinberger (born 1949)

Eliot Weinberger is one of the most distinguished translators of Latin American poetry working today, best known for his translations of Octavio Paz (including the collected poems Obras Completas) as well as translations of Jorge Luis Borges and other Spanish-language poets. He is also the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry (2003), which brought Tang and Song Dynasty poetry to English readers. His 2016 essay collection The Ghosts of Birds and his political essays collected in What I Heard About Iraq demonstrate the breadth of his engagement with language, politics, and culture.

What makes a good translator?

The translators above share certain qualities that define excellence in the craft, qualities that are as relevant to professional translators today as they were to St Jerome or Constance Garnett.

Deep command of source and target languages. Knowledge of the source language is only the beginning. The translator must write with equivalent skill in the target language. Constance Garnett's achievement was not just that she could read Russian, it was that she could write English prose of sufficient quality to render Tolstoy.

Cultural and historical knowledge. Translation is not decoding. Many translation choices require knowledge of the historical context in which a text was written — what a word meant in its original time and place, not what it means now. Champollion's ability to decode hieroglyphics depended on his knowledge of Coptic as a late form of Egyptian.

A principled approach to equivalence. Every translator faces the fundamental choice between formal equivalence (word-for-word fidelity) and dynamic equivalence (thought-for-thought meaning). The translators in this list made different choices (Tyndale privileged fidelity to the Greek, Borges embraced creative infidelity, Emily Wilson used iambic pentameter to find an English equivalent of Homeric meter) and each choice produced a different kind of translation. For more on this, see the guide to what makes a good translation.

Tomedes continues this tradition of expert human translation today — certified translators with subject-matter expertise working across 270+ languages, backed by ISO 17100:2015 certification and a 1-Year Quality Guarantee. For historical document translation for museums, archives, and cultural institutions, Tomedes provides specialist translators with the linguistic and cultural knowledge the work requires.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Who is considered the greatest translator in history?
A: There is no universal answer, but St Jerome and William Tyndale are the two most commonly cited for the sheer scale of their cultural impact — Jerome's Vulgate shaped Western Christianity for a millennium; Tyndale's words became the King James Bible. In terms of literary translation, Constance Garnett and Gregory Rabassa are frequently cited for what they brought to English audiences.

Q: Who was the first translator in history?
A: The first documented translators worked around 2500 BC, translating Sumerian symbols into Eblaite on clay tablets. The Epic of Gilgamesh was translated from Akkadian into other Asian languages around 2000 BC, making it one of the earliest known works of literary translation.

Q: Were there famous women translators in history?
A: Yes, though most are underrepresented in historical records because women's translation work was frequently uncredited or attributed to male supervisors. Constance Garnett (1861–1946) is the most prominent historical example. In contemporary translation, Lydia Davis and Emily Wilson are among the most celebrated translators working in English today, and women now constitute approximately 71% of the professional translation and interpretation workforce.

Q: What is the difference between a translator and an interpreter?
A: A translator works with written text, producing a written translation. An interpreter works with spoken language, rendering speech in real time either consecutively (after the speaker pauses) or simultaneously (as the speaker speaks). The skills overlap but the roles are distinct, and simultaneous interpretation is considered one of the most cognitively demanding professional tasks in language work.

Q: What did William Tyndale translate?
A: William Tyndale translated the New Testament into English from the original Greek (1526) and translated approximately half of the Old Testament before his execution in 1536. Approximately 84% of the King James Bible (1611) is based on Tyndale's English translation, revised and updated by the KJV committee. Tyndale is credited with introducing phrases into English that remain in everyday use: "the salt of the earth," "let there be light," "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak."