Perhaps the motives or combinations of motives of translators are as varied and numerous as translators themselves. Undoubtedly there are few instances of completely unmixed motives in this field. Nevertheless, some principal motives which both enter into the translator's work and in various ways influence the results can be discerned and sorted out.

A purely monetary motivation is rare, but where it exists it results in the typical "hack job," with words thrown together, ideas strung along, and an absence of sensitivity to the real message and spirit of the original work. But since pay for translating is notoriously poor, few persons engage in it merely for monetary reward. Certainly, when the work is at all outstanding, other and much more important considerations are present; for example, the challenge of solving a puzzle in communication, a vicarious participation in some great creative work, or a desire to gain some distinction at least on the periphery of belles lettres. A translator may also be motivated by a sincere humanitarian purpose, namely, to convey an important message in an intelligible form. Such a motivation has certainly been dominant in the history of Bible translating, and is similarly evident in the dedicated efforts of early scholars who reproduced the classics in modern European languages, as well as in those of many present-day translators who strive to translate scientific texts into languages in which the terminology of Western science is strange and new.

Various combinations of experience and motivation produce different types of translators. They can probably best be summarized in three principal categories, as Nabokov (1941, p. 161) has done: (1) the scholar, who certainly commits fewer blunders than the drudgc, but who must have, in addition to learning and diligence, some imagination and style if he is to do a good job; (2) the well-meaning hack, who laboriously strings words, phrases, and sentences together in intelligible, but stylistically barren, ways; and (3) the professional writer, who, on the one hand, may miss the point in his translation because he lacks the scholar's insight, оr, on the other, may tend to dress up the real author to look like himself.

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