September 30 is International Translation Day, marked on the date tradition holds St. Jerome died in 420 CE after translating the Bible into Latin. It also carries two very different 20th-century debuts — a nuclear submarine and a jumbo jet — and the anniversary of India's deadliest recorded earthquake in stable continental crust.
On this day
1938The Munich Agreement is signed by Britain, France, Germany and Italy after thirteen hours of talks, handing Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland to Nazi Germany in a bid to avert war — the appeasement Winston Churchill called a surrender, and one that failed within six months.Unknown Průmyslová tiskárna via Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
1954USS Nautilus is commissioned at Groton, Connecticut, becoming the world's first nuclear-powered submarine; four years later it would make the first voyage by any vessel under the geographic North Pole.Vonsky87 via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0- 1993IndiaA magnitude-6.2 earthquake strikes Latur and Dharashiv in Maharashtra at 3:56am, killing more than 9,700 people in their sleep — the deadliest earthquake ever recorded in a stable continental interior rather than a tectonic plate boundary.
Did you know
The UN only declared September 30 International Translation Day in 2017, but translators had marked the date informally for decades before that — because it's the day tradition holds St. Jerome died near Bethlehem in 420 CE, after translating most of the Bible into Latin directly from Greek and Hebrew manuscripts.