I've been working on translations since I was on a school bench as a student. I attended a grammar school, so my everyday assignment was some translation from an ancient language. However, one of the most encouraging remarks I ever got from my teachers was in the framework of a translation from…English! I was told that I was fit to become a professional translator because of my linguistic sensibility.
That did not happen. Today I am a teacher, and I do my best to develop the same linguistic sensibility in my students, when dealing with Latin, Greek, and above all, Italian. In Italy there is currently a debate about whether or not to eliminate Latin and Greek translations from grammar school graduation tests. Some argue that translating is a useless exercise and that students should focus on placing an author in his historical and cultural context.
The reality is that fewer and fewer kids are able to translate. Indeed, to translate is not to comment.
To work as pontifex (bridge builder) between two languages and cultures, you need to know their morpho-syntactic structures, which are related to the way people think. You must be humble enough to listen to the person speaking in the starting language (alive, dead or sick), so that others who do not dominate that code are able to understand as much as possible. Student’s skill set includes a deep knowledge of the two cultural worlds, a humble mediator attitude, sensitivity to the nuances of the signifiers and the ability to make them meaningful.
Are we living in a world where communicating between people of different languages is becoming more and more superfluous?
Unless we decide that our world can exist without the endless patrimony represented by the Babel of the languages, we will always need good translators, good pontifices.