Have You Ever Considered the Fact That...

... it was Christianity that boosted linguistics, translations and translation studies?

SS Cyril and Methodius, the great translators, Fathers of Slavic civilization.

Unlike Islam, which insists on 'un-createdness' and 'un-translatability' of the Quran, or Buddhism and other Oriental religions, which have been extremely ethnically centered, unlike even Judaism, which only Alexander the Great could force into translating its holy Book, the Torah, into Greek, the lingua franca of the antiquity, Christianity immediately acknowledged the necessity to translate what Jesus and His disciples had said, due to its universalist, all-embracing claims. Early Christians were not afraid of the inevitable loss of certain layers of meaning typical of any translation. The Good News of the Incarnation of the Logos was not subject to any culture or language, it was meant to be beyond all cultures and embrace all languages.

Since then, the Bible was translated into countless languages, more than any other book. In fact, for some of those languages, the Bible still remains the only written piece of literature; even for some of the world's major languages in terms of speakers and area, the Bible was the beginning of written tradition, the beginning of literature (as is the case with Russian, for instance). Translators of the Bible have been travelling far and wide, creating alphabets, describing grammars, compiling dictionaries... It is thanks to their work that we have linguistics (and translation studies, as a branch of linguistic) in its modern sense. We as linguists and translators must always remember that.