list of translators

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 Qubcois 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)

Translators of Herodotus' The Histories

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

Translators of The Qur'an

Translators of Icelandic and other Scandinavian classics

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

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

Translators of Tolstoy

Translators of Prus

Translators of Mann

Translators of Kafka

Translators of Musil

Translators of Proust

Translators of Borges

Other notable translators of Spanish

Gregory Rabassa - prolific translator of Mrquez, Cortazar and several others.
Margaret Sayers Peden - translator of Quiroga, Neruda, Fuentes and several other Latin American writers.

Other notable translators of Russian

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, Cline, 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

Translators of Aquinas

Translators of Descartes

Translators of Spinoza

Translators of Leibniz

Translators of Vico

Thomas Goddard Bergin & Max Harold Fisch

Translators of Kant

Translators of Hegel

Translators of Schopenhauer

Translators of Kierkegaard

Translators of Nietzsche

Translators of Heidegger's Being and Time

Translators of Derrida

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 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
tienne 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

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

List Of Translators