Translation: A Link between Cultures and Civilizations

In the course of history, cultures and civilizations have always interacted and been influenced by each other in different ways. The interactions have sometimes been direct and at others indirect. Most of the time, these relationships have been peaceful and developed through cultural, scientific, and commercial interactions among experts, elites, professionals and businessmen in the first place. Then, the outcome was incorporated into the whole community, and would be part of the culture and civilization in that region. In many other cases, the beginning of this process was through military confrontation and war between two nations. After the war and settlement of the dispute, the interchange of the intellectual, scientific, and cultural achievements of the victor and the vanquished nations would start and the two opposing nations came closer to each other. A very important point to note in all these interactions and exchange of findings is the place of translation and translators. They played a very significant role, in individual attempts as well as in organized manner in different translation movements like those of Iran, Islamic world, Spain, Sicily, etc, and tried to establish and facilitate the relationship among different cultures and civilizations.