Manuscripts of Latin Translations of Scientific Texts from Arabic (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Attitude of the Medieval Latin Translators Towards the Arabic Sciences.
The exploration of the prefaces written by many translators of texts from Arabic into Latin or even into Castilian is intended to examine some of the personal reflections we find in many of the translators’ works, the conviction which impressed itself on their minds of the backwardness of Christian Europe compared with the abundance and development of Arabic science, and the overriding need to appropriate and apply this scientific knowledge to enable their world to overcome its state of ignorance and intellectual poverty and the recovery of «ancient philosophy», enlarged and refined by the Arabs. The translators express their enthusiasm in two important areas of knowledge: in religion, via the study of the doctrine of Islam and the life and work of the prophet Muhammad, in apologetics and controversy; and in philosophy and science, by providing the Latin world the texts that would prove vital for the advance of Western culture in the modern era.
The Reflection of Scientific Facts in the Translation of the Qur'an
The purpose of this study is to explore the possibility of preserving scientific facts in the translation of the Qur'an, as one of its challenging and inimitable features. It should be pointed out that many scientific subject matters, dealt with in the Qur'an, give rise to translation challenges. Such matters are scientifically proven by today's scientific discoveries, but not dealt with sufficiently in translation. Lack of knowledge in many scientific issues results in incompatibility between the translation product and the advanced knowledge of today; this requires that translators of the Qur'an should be equipped with thorough scientific knowledge in order to enable the target text accommodate the source text's scientific facts. The theoretical part of the study is based on the idea that scientific facts in the Qur'an have not been adequately scrutinized from a translational perspective. Most of their efforts focus on the linguistic aspects and literal semantics of the sacred text, stripped from scientific implications. In order to prove the translators' unintended neglect of these facts, a number of translations are examined and enough supporting explanation of scientific resources is provided to show the congruence between what was revealed in the Qur'an before fourteen centuries, and what modern sciences have uncovered. The study draws the conclusion that scientific knowledge in different scientific fields is essential in the translation of the Qur'an, as it is a possible fact that the translator is liable to commit mistakes in the translation of scientific statements if s/he is not expert or specialist in the scientific discipline under question. Therefore, translators should be knowledgeable in all aspects of the Qur'an in order to be able to provide an authentic rendition in the receptive language.
Translation of Scientific Hints in the Qur'a n 978-3-659-62260-1.pdf
Translation of Scientific Hints in the Qur'an: The Linguistic Challenge and Exegetical Controversies, 2014
This study investigates the problems of translating polysemous words with scientific allusions in the Qur’ân in four English translations, namely George Sale's The Koran: or Alcoran of Mohammed (1877), Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall's The Meaning of the Glorious Koran (1970), Ahmad Zidan and Dina Zidan's The Glorious Qur'an: Text and Translation (1996), and M. A. S. Abdel Haleem's The Qur’ân: A New Translation (2005). They are analyzed diachronically to detect any development in the translation of these ambiguous words; to pinpoint the problems of translating them into English; and to identify the most effective translation strategies that help translators render them successfully. The thesis also outlines the history of scientific exegesis and the different arguments on it. It discusses the concepts of wujûh Al-Qur’ân, and polysemy in Arabic and English and their implications for Qur’ân exegesis and translation. It also explores the concepts of equivalence, approximation, translation loss, compensation, functional translation, etc. Nord's Functional Approach is applied to analyze eight verses that talk about scientific phenomena related to different fields — astronomy, physics, chemistry, geography, geology, oceanography, embryology and physiology. Where the four translators fail to convey the scientific reference in the verse, the researcher proposes an alternative translation that agrees with the linguistic, exegetical and scientific connotations of the verse. Additionally, a questionnaire containing all the translations and their proposed alternatives has been distributed among native speakers of English and Arabic-English bilinguals to test the findings from the Functional Approach and to maximize the objectivity of the analysis. The study shows that scientific facts are more evident in recent Qur’ân translations, and that failure to render them arises from linguistic, exegetical and scientific reasons. It also demonstrates the efficiency of the Functional Approach and documentary translation strategies in the assessment and production of communicative translations that faithfully relay scientific allusions in polysemous words in the Qur’ân. Keywords: Scientific exegesis and miraculousness in the Qur’ân, wujûh Al-Qur’ân, polysemy and homonymy, the functional approach, Skopostheorie, documentary translation, audio-medial function.
Overcoming the Scientific Translation Challenges: Examples from English into Arabic
التدوين, 2021
Abstract: Translation is an act of transferring text from one language into another; this act requires some skills that can be divided into two types linguistic and extra- linguistic skills. As we live in globalization era which is characterized with the dominance of English as universal language of scientific inventions and communication, translation has a paramount role to contribute in the scientific dissemination. The scientific texts are considered as a challenge for the translator since they contain terms and scientific topics, to overcome these challenges the translator has to be familiar with terminology in one hand and with scientific topics in other hand. This article aims at shedding light on scientific language features, in addition to determine the different problems of the scientific translation, in order to establish approaches to scientific translation by analyzing translated scientific examples. Key words: scientific translation, terminology, translation approach, extra-linguistic skills
José Martínez Gázquez, The Attitude of the Medieval Latin Translators Towards the Arabic Sciences
The prefaces to many translations of texts from Arabic into Latin or even into Castilian reflect many of their authors’ opinions. The translators focussed on some important areas of knowledge: in religion, on apologetics and controversy connected with the study of Islamic doctrine and the life and work of the prophet Muhammad; and in philosophy and science. This anthology offers a rich series of medieval scholarly testimonies on the persistence of Islam in Spain and in particular in Toledo. Texts are provided both in their original Latin or Castilian and also in English translation.
A Quest for Reviving the Past: Arabic Lines in English Translation and Terminology
Scientific Journal of October 6 University, 2014
By the late 1200s, medieval Europeans began to stir out of their long Dark-Age-sleep to become captivated by the scientific contributions of the Islamic civilization, the vital raw material on which the Western Renaissance built its structure. Arabic, the 'lingua franca' of the Medieval time, was the medium through which versions of Greek scientific and philosophical knowledge were recovered, translated, supplemented and transmitted to the Western World. Medicine was the biggest beneficiary of this knowledge as one of the first sciences that was given interest in writings. Some hundred years later, Latin Europe benefited from these translations. Once the Spanish city of Toledo was conquered by the Arabs, the Greco-Arab manuscripts were translated into Latin, the language of the learned in medieval Europe. As a result, a new method of translation was adopted, and Arabic medical terms found their way into western medicine, pharmacy and chemistry. This paper places emphasis on discussing the gradual emergence of Arabic influence in both language and translation within medieval Europe and Middle English. The Arabic role in the multilingual context and the process of the dissemination of Arab sciences in several centres in Europe are discussed. In addition, it presents a brief overview of how such contribution has left traces in modern and today's medical English and the medical terms commonly derived from Arabic roots. Finally, this study is not to claim that Arabic is superior to other languages, but to focus on the role of the Arabic Language and translation in the Medieval Western medicine.
Mediterranea, 2022
This collection of articles is the culmination of a fruitful two-day workshop on « The Translation of Arabic Scientific Texts into Greek between the 9 th and 15 th Centuries » (26-27 February 2021). The conference was organized under the auspices of the Gutenberg International Conference Center at Mainz as part of the Mainz History Talks, with support from Princeton University's Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity and Program in Medieval Studies. We heard not only a number of fascinating papers, but also, especially in the discussions, an emerging consensus regarding the need for hitherto scattered research impulses to coalesce into a more concrete framework for the development of what might be termed Arabo-Greek Studies. We hope to model Arabo-Greek Studies on the established field of Graeco-Arabic, especially in its dual usage of philological and historical approaches in analyzing the Greco-Arabic translations produced in ʿAbbasid Baghdad and elsewhere. Our conception of Arabo-Greek Studies is dedicated to the medieval translations of Arabic works into Greek, a phenomenon that we can begin to trace from the ninth century, and which continued through the fall of the Byzantine Empire. In the contributions in this issue, dedicated to scientific translations from Arabic to Greek, we see that Arabo-Greek translation was built on Graeco-Arabic foundations. Arabo-Greek translation occurred in many of the same subjects in which translations from Graeco-Arabic translations had already occurred and on subjects, like astrology, medicine, and alchemy, where the Greek tradition formed