Of all the trades in the world, few can claim a patron saint and a global day of their own. Translators can: every 30 September the world marks International Translation Day, and the date is no accident. It is the day on which, in the year 420, Jerome of Stridon died in Bethlehem — the man who rendered the Bible into Latin and, along the way, left one of the first lucid reflections on how a text ought to be translated.
Eusebius Hieronymus was born around the year 347 in Stridon, a town on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia whose exact site is still debated. Born into a comfortable family, he was educated in Rome under the grammarian Aelius Donatus, who taught him Latin and the arts of rhetoric, and there he also picked up some Greek. He was a voracious reader and a restless traveller: Trier, Antioch, the Syrian desert, Constantinople. Somewhere along that pilgrimage he decided to learn Hebrew — a rarity for a Latin-speaking Christian — and that decision would change everything.
Around the year 382, back in Rome, Pope Damasus I entrusted him with a formidable task: to bring order to the Latin versions of the Bible. Many divergent translations were then in circulation — the so-called Vetus Latina — made from the Greek, at odds with one another and riddled with copyists' errors. Jerome began by revising the Gospels. But when, settled in Bethlehem from the year 386 and supported by the patronage of the Roman aristocrat Paula, he turned to the Old Testament, he made a bold choice: he would not translate from the Greek Septuagint, the version the Church had venerated for centuries, but directly from the original Hebrew. He called this principle Hebraica veritas, the "Hebrew truth". The fruit of more than two decades of labour is the work posterity knows as the Vulgate, which the Council of Trent would enshrine as the official text in 1546.
The choice was not a peaceful one. From North Africa, a still-young Augustine of Hippo wrote to him uneasily: he feared that departing from the Septuagint — the text Greeks and Latins held to be inspired — would sow discord among the churches. The story goes that in the city of Oea, when the new version of the Book of Jonah was read at Mass, the word tradition knew as "gourd" had turned into "ivy", and the congregation nearly rioted. The detail, trivial in appearance, held an enormous question: how far may a translator correct what his readers believe to be sacred?
Jerome answered his critics with a letter that remains required reading in any school of translation. Written around the year 395 and addressed to his friend Pammachius, Letter 57 bears the title De optimo genere interpretandi, "On the Best Method of Translating". In it he argues, invoking the example of Cicero, that the good translator renders not word for word, but sense for sense — non verbum e verbo, sed sensum de sensu — because slavery to the letter betrays the spirit of the original. With one emphatic exception: Holy Scripture, "where even the order of the words is a mystery". There, and only there, the translator must tread on tiptoe. In that distinction between fidelity to sense and fidelity to the letter lies, in embryo, much of the translation theory of the fifteen centuries that followed.
From that Bethlehem cell to today
For that immense work and that clarity, tradition made Jerome the patron of translators, and in 2017 the United Nations General Assembly, through resolution 71/288, proclaimed his feast day — 30 September — International Translation Day. It was an official acknowledgement of something he embodied like few others: that carrying a text from one language into another is not a mechanical chore but an act of responsibility and of faith. Sixteen centuries later, when a sworn translator authorised by Spain's Ministry of Foreign Affairs certifies that a translation is faithful and complete, they unknowingly extend the gesture of that monk who shut himself away in Bethlehem to argue, word by word and sense by sense, over what it truly means to say the same thing in another tongue.