During the National Revival period, attempts to revise the medieval Bible translations were made by Petar Sapunov, Neofit Rilski and others. The first full translation of the Bible, however, was only completed in 1871 by the American missionaries Riggs and Long and the Bulgarians Konstantin Fotinov and Petko Slavejkov. This translation played an important part in the development of Bulgarian written culture.
The National Revival period is characterized by a surge of translations. Most published books were translations, filling the lacuna of scant original writing in Bulgarian. Initially, the emphasis was wholly on religious texts, then also school textbooks, and from the 1830s onwards literary texts. A significant stimulus was given with the appearance of the first periodicals: Philology in 1842, Bulgarian eagle in 1846 and especially the Constantinople herald in 1848. The selection of source languages and genres steadily widened. During the first decades of the 19th century most translations were made from Greek; afterwards, French and Russian were added, then also translations from English, German, Italian and various Slavic languages. Prior to the achievement of independence in 1878, the chosen genres included popular novels (Eugène Sue), sentimental tales (Ch. von Schmidt), 17th- and 18th-century classics (Fénélon, Defoe).
At the beginning of the National Revival period there was also a renewed popular interest in ancient Greek (the Alexandriad) and Oriental books (The tale of Syntipas the Philosopher). In the mid-century adaptations of international classics began to appear (the Arabian Nights, the Decameron), often in a “Bulgarianized” re-working (Joakim Gruev’s The orphan Cvetana based on Nikolaj Mihailovic Karamzin). The best-represented foreign literatures were ancient Greek (Homer, Herodotus), French (Voltaire, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre) and Russian (Veltman, Karamzin, Puškin). Very often literary works were not translated from the language in which they were written, but indirectly from Greek, Russian, French or Serbian, a practice that diminished but never completely disappeared. Most of the National Revival authors were also translators (Slavejkov, Nikola Mihajlovski and others, among them also a number of women: Irina Ekzarh and Elena Muteva).
Translated literature received close attention from literary critics. Nešo Boncev’s criticized translators’ poor standards. Others (e.g. Stefan S. Bobcev) had a more balanced opinion concerning the role of translations in Bulgarian culture. Sometimes fierce debates broke out about particular translations (like Grigor Parlicev’s translation of the Iliad, 1871).
