Before we had google translate and all of this stuff to do it for us, how did we originally translate one language to another? I mean, before we had “english to french” dictionaries and all of that.
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Consider the [Rosetta Stone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone) (the original stone not the learning program). The same text is written in Ancient Egyptian using two different scripts, the third is in Ancient Greek. It probably wasn’t easy, but if several people knew those languages and scripts, they would collaborate and find consistent correspondences in the texts. Another way, and probably the most common is that a person or group of persons speaks multiple languages, and will say or write the same thing in those languages. Again, you can build consistent correspondences. The tools were just some form of ink, parchment, paper or whatever. For example, the Rig Veda, the Hindu scripture and oldest religious text was originally transmitted orally in Vedic Sanskrit, but when it was written down (over centuries and various locations), it was often written on banana leaves that were made into something like papyrus.
English man : *points at apple * apple
French man : pomme
That mostly explains it.
Well, translation dictionaries have existed for a long time, much longer than either English or French. The Roman Emperor Claudius was known to have an Etruscan<->Latin dictionary, and he lived from 10BCE to 54CE. Similarly, the Mahavyutpatti existed in 9th century Tibet and translated Tibetan and Sanskrit.
When it comes to spoken language from ages ago, it was a matter of immersion and trial-and-error. You point at a stool, and say “Stool”, then have someone do the same. Eventually you get to the point where you can begin constructing sentences.
Multilingual people were common in trading locations like ports if you needed something translated you went to someone who would translate it for you.
The same way we do it now. A person who understands both languages translates them. Computer traslators kinda work, but they are still pretty bad. All professional translation is still done by a person, like it always has been. Computer translation is getting better, but isn’t there yet.
And dictionaries aren’t enough to translate by themselves.
As has already been said, people who where multilingual, but the interesting part comes when there is a word in one language that has no linear translation to another language.
There is either no word that it can directly translate to or the word has multiple meanings.
In cases like this, it’s usually down to more than one person to interpret what the word might mean.
Not always very well.
Either you had to find a person who spoke (read) both languages, or you had to get a translation dictionary (printed book) and look up each word one at a time. Without knowledge of the details of how the other language was spoken, it was really easy to miss details, idioms, and stuff like past tense of “might”.
In between then and now, some big cities had phone-able translation services. You could call them on a land line, and get hooked up with someone who could translate.
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