List of translators
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This is primarily a list of notable Western translators. Please feel free to add translators from other languages, cultures and areas of specialisation.
Translators into English
Literature
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- Alamgir Hashmi
- David Homel - noted translator of Québécois literature into English
- Charles Muller
- Rabindranath Tagore
- Taufiq Rafat - translated classical Punjabi poetry into English
- Cecil Parrott - translator of The Good Soldier Svejk.
- Celina Wieniewska - translator of Polish, esp. Bruno Schulz
- Jerzy Ficowski - translator of Polish, esp. Bruno Schulz
- David H. Rosenthal - translator of Tirant Lo Blanc from Catalan
- Norma Comrada - translator of Czech, esp. Karel Capek
- Christina Pribicevic-Zoric - translator of Serbo-Croatian, esp. Milorad Pavic
- Victor G. Kiernan
- Edward FitzGerald - famous for his version of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, from the Persian
- Reynold A. Nicholson
Translators of Homer (i.e. the Iliad and Odyssey)
- Samuel Butler
- Alexander Pope
- George Chapman
- E. V. Rieu
- T. E. Lawrence
- Robert Fitzgerald
- Richmond Lattimore
- Robert Fagles
Translators of Herodotus' The Histories
- Aubrey De Sélincourt
- Robin Waterfield
- Walter Blanco & Jennifer Tolbert Roberts
- George Rawlinson
- David Grene
Translators of Virgil's Aeneid
Translators of Ovid's The Metamorphoses
Translators of other famous Classical authors
- Philemon Holland
- Arthur Hugh Clough - revision of John Dryden's Plutarch's Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans
- Stephen MacKenna - translator of Plotinus
- Betty Radice
- Ian Scott-Kilvert
- Thomas North - Elizabethan translator of Plutarch
- E. F. Watling
- Philip Vellacott
- Rex Warner - translator of Thucydides
Translators of The Bible
- John Wycliffe
- Martin Luther
- L. L. Zamenhof
- Translators of The King James Bible
Translators of The Qur'an
Translators of Icelandic and other Scandinavian classics
- Gwyn Jones - also Welsh
- Hermann Palsson
- Magnus Magnusson
- Paul Edwards
- Jesse L. Byock
- Lee M. Hollander
- Anthony Faulkes
- George Johnston
Translators of Anglo-Saxon
Translators of The Arabian Nights or The Thousand and One Nights
- John Payne
- Jonathan Scott
- Andrew Lang
- Richard Francis Burton - also translated from other Oriental languages, including Sanskrit
- Edward William Lane & Stanley Lane-Poole
- Edward Powys Mathers
- Husain Haddawy
Translators of Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji
- Arthur Waley - Also a well known translator of Chinese.
- Edward Seidensticker - Also numerous other famous works of Japanese literature.
- Royall Tyler
Translators of Dante's Divine Comedy
- Allen Mandelbaum - Also a translator of Latin
- Robert M. Durling
- Robert Hollander & Jean Hollander
- John Ciardi
- W.S. Merwin
- Mark Musa
- Charles Singleton
- Anthony M. Esolen
- Dorothy L. Sayers
- C. H. Sisson
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Translators of Montaigne's Essays
Translators of Rabelais
- Thomas Urquhart & Pierre Antoine Motteux
- Jacques LeClercq
- W. F. Smith
- Burton Raffel
- J. M. Cohen
- Samuel Putnam
- Donald Frame
- M. A. Screech
Translators of Cervantes' Don Quixote
- Tobias Smollett
- Charles Jarvis
- John Ormsby (later revised by Joseph R. Jones and Kenneth Douglas)
- Peter Anthony Motteux
- Samuel Putnam
- Walter Starkie
- J. M. Cohen - also a translator of French
- Burton Raffel - also a translator of Old English, Indonesian, Vietnamese
- John Rutherford
- Edith Grossman
Translators of Goethe
- Walter W. Arndt - Also a translator of Russian
- Eric A. Blackall & Victor Lange
- W.H. Auden & Elizabeth Mayer
- Michael Hulse
- Louise Bogan
Translators of Dostoyevsky
- Jessie Coulson
- David Magarshack
- Constance Garnett
- Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky
- David McDuff
- Ignat Avsey
Translators of Tolstoy
- David Magarshack
- Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude
- Constance Garnett
- Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky
- Rosemary Edmonds
- Ann Dunnigan
Translators of Prus
Translators of Mann
Translators of Kafka
Translators of Musil
Translators of Proust
- Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin & D. J. Enright
- Christopher Prendergast, with Lydia Davis, Mark Treharne, James Grieve, John Sturrock, Carol Clark, Peter Collier, & Ian Patterson
- Joachim Neugroschel
Translators of Borges
- Norman Thomas di Giovanni
- Andrew Hurley
- Eliot Weinberger
- Alexander Coleman
- Suzanne Jill Levine
- Alastair Reid
Other notable translators of French
- Gilbert Adair
- Robert Baldick
- David Bellos
- Robin Buss
- Mary Ann Caws
- Sheila Fischman - translator of Quebec literature
- Grace Frick - translator of Marguerite Yourcenar
- Stuart Gilbert
- Richard Howard
- A. J. Krailsheimer
- Justin O'Brien - translator of Albert Camus
- Douglas Parmee
- Francis Steegmuller
- Leonard Tancock
- Geoffrey Wall - specialist in Gustave Flaubert
- Barbara Wright
Other notable translators of German
- Jean Starr Untermeyer - translated Broch
- C. V. Wedgwood - translated Canetti
- Michael Hamburger - translated Hoelderlin, Celan
- Hilda Rosner - translated Hesse
- Edward Snow - translated Rilke
- Stephen Mitchell - translated Rilke and others
- Leila Vennewitz - translated Boell, Becker and others
Other notable translators of Italian
- Beryl de Zoete - translator of Svevo
- William Weaver - prodigious, acclaimed translator
- Stuart Woolf - translator of Levi
- Raymond Rosenthal - translator of Levi
- William Arrowsmith
- Jonathan Galassi
Other notable translators of Spanish
- Gregory Rabassa - prolific translator of Márquez, Cortazar and several others.
- Margaret Sayers Peden - translator of Quiroga, Neruda, Fuentes and several other Latin American writers.
Other notable translators of Russian
- Max Hayward
- Michael Glenny
- Mirra Ginsburg
- Alan Myers
- Ronald Hingley
- John Glad
- Ronald Wilks
- Vladimir Nabokov
Other notable translators of Japanese
- Donald Keene
- Lucien Stryk & Takahashi Ikemoto
- Don Philippi - translator of Japanese and Ainu. Translated the Kojiki, also a noted technical translator.
Translators of Chinese
- Arthur Waley
- David Hawkes - translator of the Chinese classic Story of the Stone or Dream of the Red Chamber, by Cao Xueqin
Multi-lingual translators
- Joachim Neugroschel - prolific multi-award winning translator of French, Spanish, German, Hebrew, Russian
- Guido Waldman - French, Italian
- John Sturrock - French, Spanish
- John Wood - French, German
- W.S. Merwin - Greek, Spanish, Italian, Old English
- Anthea Bell - German, Polish
- Michael Henry Heim - Russian, Czech, German, Serbo-Croatian
- Ewald Osers - translator of Czech, German
- Burton Raffel - also a prolific and wide-ranging translator
- Ralph Manheim - prolific translator of both French and German writers - Grass, Céline, Remarque and several others.
Self-translators
(Authors who translated their own work into other languages)
Philosophy
Translators of Ancient Chinese classics
Translators of Ancient Indian classics
Translators of Hellenistic and Roman philosophers
- Benjamin Jowett
- Jonathan Barnes
- W. H. D. Rouse
- Hugh Tredennick
- G. M. A. Grube
- W. K. C. Guthrie
- F. M. Cornford
- E. R. Dodds
- C. D. C. Reeves
- W. R. M. Lamb
- John M. Cooper
- T. A. Sinclair
Translators of Aquinas
Translators of Descartes
Translators of Spinoza
Translators of Leibniz
Translators of Vico
Translators of Kant
- J. M. Meiklejohn
- Max Mueller
- Norman Kemp Smith
- Werner S. Pluhar
- Gary Hatfield
- Allen Wood & Paul Guyer
Translators of Hegel
Translators of Schopenhauer
Translators of Kierkegaard
Translators of Nietzsche
Translators of Heidegger's Being and Time
Translators of Derrida
- Alan Bass
- Geoffrey Bennington
- Elizabeth Rottenberg
- Gayathri Chakravorty Spivak
- Thomas Dutoit
- Peggy Kamuf
Other translators
- J. N. Findlay - Husserl
- Colin Smith - Merleau-Ponty
- Elizabeth Anscombe - Wittgenstein
- Michael Dummet - Frege
- Hazel E. Barnes - Sartre
- Andrew Bowie - Schelling, Schleiermacher
Other
- E. A. Wallis Budge - translated The Egyptian Book of the Dead
- W. Y. Evans-Wentz - translated or adapted numerous Tibetan Buddhist texts, including The Tibetan Book of the Dead
- Charles Francis Atkinson - translated Spengler
- Translators of "Harry Potter" books
Translators into languages other than English
French translators
- Jean Hyppolite - translated Hegel and popularized his work
- Antoine Galland - translated first European edition of the Arabian Nights
- J. C. Mardrus - also a translator of the Arabian Nights
- Étienne Aignan
German translators
- Johann Heinrich Voss - translated classical poetry into German
- Franz Kuhn - translator of many Chinese works including Dream of the Red Chamber into German
Hebrew translators
- Abraham_bar_Hiyya_Ha-Nasi - translated scientific works from Arabic into Hebrew (for further translation into Latin by Plato of Tivoli)
- Ibn Tibbon family - translated Greek, Roman, Arab, and Jewish works from Arabic
- Yehuda Alharizi - translated Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed and Arabic maqama poetry
- Yitzhak Salkinsohn and Franz Delitzsch - translated the New Testament into Hebrew
- Shaul Tchernichovsky - prolific literary translator
- Abraham Shlonsky - translated Shakespeare, Gogol, and others
Hispanic translators
- Jorge Luis Borges - translated many English, French, and German works into Spanish
- Javier Marías - translated many English works into Spanish
Italian translators
- Italo Calvino - translated Raymond Queneau's Les fleurs bleus (The Blue Flowers)
- Ettore Capriolo - translated McLuhan, Camus, Rushdie
- Masolino D'Amico - translated Hemingway and other authors from English
- Carlo Linati - translated Joyce, Lawrence, Yeats, Synge, Dickens and Henry James
- Vincenzo Mantovani - translated works by William Faulkner, Henri Miller, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Saul Bellow, Malcolm Lowry, Charles Bukowski, Isaac Asimov, Richard Ford, William Gaddis, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Jerzy Kosinski and others
- Maria Napolitano Martone - translated works by Ernest Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell, Archibald Joseph Cronin, James M. Cain, Williama Somerset Maugham, John Fante, William Hudson, P.G. Wodehouse, Daphne De Maurier
- Cesare Pavese - translated Melville, Dickens and others
- Fernanda Pivano - translated works by Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Lee Masters, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Thornton Wilder, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso and many other English-language authors
- Elio Vittorini - translated works by Ernest Hemingway, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, D.H. Lawrence and Edgar Allan Poe
Japanese translators
- Odajima Seisi - translator of Shakespeare
- Maruya Saiichi - translator of Joyce
- Mori Ogai - translator of Goethe and Andersen (from the German)
- Watanabe Kazuo - translator of French
- Matsudaira Chiaki - translator of Homer, Xenophon
Russian translators
- Boris Pasternak - made famous translation of Hamlet
Latin translators
- St. Jerome - responsible for the Latin Vulgate; called 'patron saint' of translators
- Robert of Ketton & Herman of Carinthia - Qur'an into Latin (1142-1143)
- Herman of Carinthia- translated Arabic scientific texts in Latin