List of translators
This is primarily a list of notable translators. Large sublists have been split off to separate articles.
By text
By target language
Into Arabic
- Ahmed Shawqi
- Hafez Ibrahim
- Ibn al-Muqaffa'
- Rifa'a el-Tahtawi
- Taha Hussein – Sophocles, Racine, others
Into Albanian
Into Armenian
- Levon Ananyan
- Vahagn Davtyan
- Hovhannes Masehian
- Vahan Malezian
- Yervant Odian
- Nahapet Rusinian
- Hamo Sahyan
- Vardges Sureniants
- Leon Surmelian
- Alexander Tsaturian
- Rita Vorperian
Into Azerbaijani (Azeri)
- Hamlet Isaxanli (Isayev) - translator of poems from Russian, English and French
Into Bulgarian
Into Chinese
Into English
Into French
- Étienne Aignan
- Jacques Amyot produced a famous version of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, later rendered into English by Sir Thomas North
- Charles Baudelaire produced a famous and immensely influential translation of the works of Edgar Allan Poe
- Georges Jean-Aubry
- Yves Bonnefoy, noted contemporary translator, particularly of English poetry.
- Marie De Cotteblanche (c1520 - c1584), a French noble woman known for her skill in languages and translation of works from Spanish to French.
- Chateaubriand translated Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost into French prose
- Anne Dacier – translated classical Greek works
- Antoine Galland - translated the first European edition of the Arabian Nights
- Jean Hyppolite - translated Hegel and popularized his work
- Leconte de Lisle – translated classical Greek authors
- Jean Baptiste Lefebvre de Villebrune - translated medical and philological works into French
- Stéphane Mallarmé - translated the poetry of E.A. Poe
- J. C. Mardrus - a translator of the Arabian Nights
- Boris Vian - translated The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler as Le grand sommeil (1948), The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler as La dame du lac (1948), The World of Null-A by A. E. van Vogt, as Le Monde des Å (1958)
Into German
- Markus Hediger – translated novels of Swiss writer Alice Rivaz and poems of Nicolas Bouvier
- Henny Koch - produced the first translation of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1890
- Franz Kuhn - translator of many Chinese works including Dream of the Red Chamber into German
- Schlegel and Tieck produced the most famous German translation of Shakespeare
- Johann Heinrich Voss - translated classical poetry into German
Into Hebrew
- Abraham bar Hiyya Ha-Nasi - translated scientific works from Arabic into Hebrew (for further translation into Latin by Plato of Tivoli)
- Yehuda Alharizi - translated Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed and Arabic maqama poetry
- T. Carmi - Shakespeare
- Ibn Tibbon family - translated Greek, Roman, Arab, and Jewish works from Arabic
- Emperor D. Pedro II - translated poetry by Luís de Camões from Portuguese
- Abraham Regelson - translated literature from English and Yiddish
- Yitzhak Salkinsohn - relatively early (19th century) translator of Milton and Shakespeare
- Abraham Shlonsky - translated Shakespeare, Gogol, and others
- Adin Steinsaltz - dozens of volumes of Talmud from Aramaic
- Shaul Tchernichovsky - prolific literary translator
Into Hindi
- Nirmal Verma - translated Karel Capek, Jiri Fried, Joseph Skoversky, Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal[1]
Into Interlingua
- Alexander Gode - translated scientific and medical literature into Interlingua
Into Italian
- Italo Calvino - translated Raymond Queneau's Les fleurs bleues (The Blue Flowers)
- Ettore Capriolo - translated McLuhan, Camus, Rushdie
- Eduardo De Filippo - translated Shakespeare's The Tempest into 18th century Neapolitan
- Vincenzo Mantovani - translated works by William Faulkner, Henry 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
- Grazyna Miller - translated Pope John Paul II's Roman Triptych: Meditations from Polish into Italian
- 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
Into Japanese
- Ogai Mori - translator of Goethe and Andersen (from the German)
- Haruki Murakami - translator of Raymond Chandler
- Maruya Saiichi - translator of Joyce
Into Juhuri
- Sergey Izgiyaev - translated the libretto of Uzeyir Hajibeyov's opera Layla and Majnun, and poems by Mikhail Lermontov, Suleyman Stalsky, Gamzat Tsadasa, Rasul Gamzatov and other poets
Into Latin
- Boniface Consiliarius translated numerous church documents from Greek into Latin.
- Herman of Carinthia translated Arabic scientific texts into Latin.
- St. Jerome produced the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible; is regarded among Christians as the patron saint of translators.
- Robert of Ketton and Herman of Carinthia rendered the Qur'an into Latin (1142-1143)
- William of Moerbeke medieval translator of Aristotle and ancient Greek science
Into Persian
- Jalal Al-e-Ahmad – translated works by Camus, Sartre, Dostoyevsky, etc.
Into Polish
- Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński – prolific translator of French classic literature; murdered by the Nazis.
- Stanisław Czerski - translator of the fables of Phaedrus
- Ignacy Krasicki – translated Plutarch and Ossian.
- Bolesław Leśmian – poet who translated the tales of Edgar Allan Poe.
- Maciej Słomczyński – translator of James Joyce's Ulysses and of the complete works of Shakespeare.
- Robert Stiller – prolific translator of classic and contemporary literature, from a score of languages, European as well as Oriental.
- Władysław Syrokomla – superb translator of Latin, French, German, Russian and Ukrainian poets, including works by Béranger, Goethe, Heine, Lermontov, Nekrasov and Shevchenko.
- Julian Tuwim – translator of Alexander Pushkin and other Russian poets.
- Adam Ważyk – translator of Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.
Into Portuguese
- Machado de Assis
- Monteiro Lobato
- Carlos do Amaral Freire
- Daniel Galera
- Décio Pignatari - translator of Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe and McLuhan
- Abraham Usque
Into Russian
- Aleksey Mikhalyov - translated John Steinbeck's East of Eden and many other authors, as well as numerous films and cartoons
- Ivan Bunin - translated The Song of Hiawatha
- Alexander Druzhinin - translated several of Shakespeare's plays and the poetry of George Crabbe
- Nikolay Gnedich - made the classical translation of The Iliad
- Mikhail Lozinsky - made the classical translation of The Divine Comedy
- Samuil Marshak - translated Shakespeare's sonnets, among his other works
- Midori Miura - translated Non-chan kumo ni noru by Momoko Ishii
- Vladimir Nabokov - translated Alice in Wonderland and Lolita
- Boris Pasternak - translated Faust and Hamlet
- Viktor Golyshev - translated Light in August, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, All the King's Men, Theophilus North, 1984, Other Voices, Other Rooms, Set This House on Fire, Pulp and other books. He mostly worked on American literature
- Rita Rait-Kovaleva - translated The Catcher in the Rye and other works, including those by William Faulkner, Franz Kafka and Heinrich Böll.
Into Spanish
- Jorge Luis Borges - translated many English, French, and German works into Spanish
- Javier Marías - translated many English works into Spanish
Into Swahili
- Julius Nyerere, first president of Tanzania, translated Shakespeare into Swahili
Into Swedish
- Carl August Hagberg – translator or Shakespeare.
Into Luganda
- Iddi Ndyabawe - translator of Attar
Self-translators
(Authors who translated their own work into other languages)
- Natyaguru Nurul Momen
- Samuel Beckett
- Karen Blixen
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Julien Green
- Girish Karnad
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Rabindranath Tagore