In 1962, a machine produced the first translation from English into Romanian. “You explain the development of science and we help describe the examples” was the sentence translated. Back then it was a great thing; today it is utterly commonplace.
An early system for simultaneous interpreting was developed for the League of Nations in 1931. It allowed speeches to be interpreted simultaneously through radio equipment and headphones, so listeners could follow them in their mother tongue.
In 1521, in Câmpulung-Muscel, the old capital of Wallachia, the first compact, unitary written document known to date in the Romanian language was drawn up: Neacșu’s Letter from Câmpulung. The letter contains a secret of great importance, warning Johannes Benkner, the mayor of Brașov, of a Turkish invasion of Transylvania and Wallachia that was being prepared south of the Danube.
The first translation of a novel to appear in Romania dates from 1794, so we can speak of about two hundred years of history. The first epic text translated was a hundred-page fragment of Baltasar Gracián’s El Criticón, rendered from Spanish through a Greek intermediary and published in Iași.
In 1570, Coresi printed the Psalter and the Liturgy Book in Romanian for the first time. The Psalter was based on translations from Maramureș that Coresi had at hand in manuscript.
On 21 January 1648, the first complete translation of the New Testament into Romanian appeared in Alba Iulia (known at the time as Bălgrad). The Bălgrad New Testament is considered a reference work for later translations of the Holy Scriptures. The translation is by the Metropolitan of Transylvania, Simion Ștefan.
The first translation of a poem by Mihai Eminescu was made in Sighetu Marmației in 1885, into Hungarian, by Laurențiu Bran, a final-year pupil at the Piarist secondary school in Sighet. Laurențiu Bran, later a Greek-Catholic priest in the village of Someș-Săplâc (today Aluniș), was the first Romanian translator of Mihai Eminescu’s poems into Hungarian.