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Translation and interpreting in the Arabic ofthe Middle Ages: lessons in contextualization

GHADA OSMAN

Abstract Between the seventh and the eighth centuries, a remarkable linguistic phenomenon took place: the Arabic language, which in the early seventh century had been mainly the tongue of a few isolated tribes in Western Arabia, became the spoken and written language of a vast region that spanned from the Oxus River in the East to the Atlantic Ocean in the West. Virtually overnight, speakers of other languages had to become conversant and literate in Arabic in order to maintain their positions throughout the Arabic-speaking Muslim Empire. Throughout this dramatic transition, translation of foreign texts into Arabic and interpreting between Arabic and other languages such as Aramaic, Coptic, Greek, and Persian became of tantamount importance. Despite the scale and speed of these endeavors, they included some consistently common methodological components. This article uses medieval Arabic sources to explore the ways in which translation and interpreting were carried out in this context, analyzing the accepted methodology in its role as a reflection of the dominant sociolinguistic environment of the time. The final portion of the article discusses the relevance of this methodology and sociolinguistic environment with regard to questions within the field of Arabic translation and interpreting that are raised today. Keywords: Arabic; medieval Islam; translation movement; interpreting. Introduction The rapid spread of Islam in the seventh century across Western Asia and North Africa was a remarkable phenomenon that has fueled rich discussion for many decades. In one brief century the Muslims went from being a small, persecuted minority in Mecca in Western Arabia to becoming the rulers of a significant Empire spanning West Asia, North Africa, and most of Spain. As these Muslim
01652516/11/02070107 Walter de Gruyter Intl. J. Soc. Lang. 207 (2011), pp. 107125 DOI 10.1515/IJSL.2011.005

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108 G. Osman Arabs expanded their political control during the Prophet Muhammads lifetime and, more significantly, after his death in 632, their language also exploded onto the world stage. Prior to the advent of Islam, Arabic had been a minor member of the southern branch of the Semitic language family, used by a few tribes and communities in the Arabian Peninsula, with a rich oral but very poor written tradition. Literacy at the time was so rare that those who could read and write were viewed as curiosities. Within one hundred years, however, Arabic developed to become the spoken, written, and official language of an empire that stretched from the Oxus River in Central Asia to the Atlantic Ocean. As Anwar G. Chejne (1969: 45) highlights, Arabic, which was originally a dialect of a nomadic or semi-nomadic people, emerged at the beginning of the eighth century as a full-fledged language of empire and as an instrument of thought par excellence. The large-scale shift from a diversity of local languages to an almost uniformly Arabic-speaking realm is often attributed to the Caliph (ruler) Abd al-Malik (ruled 685705), the institutor of many reforms across the Muslim Empire. In the year 700, he decreed that Arabic replace local tongues as the official language of government. Almost overnight, local bureaucratic officials had to learn to communicate in Arabic, and it took little time for official documents to be written in almost flawless Arabic. Yet as extraordinary as this shiftwas, it represented only one aspect of the exceptional hold that Arabic came to enjoy. Even more striking was Arabics rapid ascent as the literary language of an empire, to the extent that even non-bureaucratic texts by nonMuslims (such as the Egyptian Christian communitys religious manuscripts, for example) came to be written in Arabic. Furthermore, Arabic became the lingua franca and/or a vernacular for much of the population of the Muslim Empire, Muslim and non-Muslim individuals alike. The unprecedented nature of this transformation at least among the languages found in the Mediterranean Basin area can be appreciated by comparisons with predecessor religious/political languages, such as Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, none of which was able to gain this sort of wide scale or long-term prominence. Throughout this dramatic transition, interpreting between Arabic and local languages such as Aramaic, Coptic, Greek, and Persian and translation of foreign texts into Arabic became of tantamount importance. Initially, local Arabs learned the tongues of their neighbors in order to communicate with them. As the power of the Muslims expanded, it was the inhabitants of the newlyconquered territories that acted as interpreters, as well as in time translators of central texts. Throughout the centuries, the role of the interpreters and translators shifted, but they continued to be central to the Muslim Empire: without their efforts, the Muslims communications with those around them would not have been possible, thereby stilting the Muslims political, social, and intellectual growth.

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Arabic of the Middle Ages 109 Despite this crucial rule of translation and interpreting in the Muslim Empire, very little research has been carried out on the subject. The research that exists about one aspect of it, the translation movement of manuscripts from Greek to Arabic of the ninth to fourteenth centuries, has focused mainly on what has been translated, but not on how this was done. Scholarship has otherwise been remarkably silent on the subject. This article uses medieval Arabic sources to explore the ways in which interpreting and translation were carried out during the first few centuries of Islam. It begins by discussing the development of each of interpreting and translation, then moves on to focus on the translation movement in particular, examining who the central translators were, then launching into an investigation of the methodology of their translation. The final section of the article discusses the relevance of this methodology with regard to questions within the field of Arabic translation and interpreting that are raised today. 1. The development of interpreting Before the spread of Islam and Arabic, the other languages in the region surrounding the Arabian Peninsula included Syriac and Aramaic dialects in the Western Arabian Peninsula and the former Sasanian Persian Empire; Middle Persian (Pahlavi) in the former Sasanian Empire; Coptic in Egypt; Berber dialects in North Africa; South Arabic, a language closely related to Ethiopian, in Yemen; and Greek, which was used as a literary and official language in the provinces of the Byzantine Empire. Points of contact existed between Arabic and the surrounding languages in pre-Islamic times, a precursor to the more regular exchanges that occurred with the rise and spread of Islam. In preIslamic Syria, and to a lesser extent Iraq, there were already Arabs, both settled and nomad. Many of the tribes there had converted to Christianity, in particular those tribes who formed the small state of Hira, which the Sasanian Persian kings used as a buffer between themselves and the Bedouin tribes of Arabia. Similarly, in the course of time the Banu Ghassan tribe, whom the Byzantines used as a buffer between themselves and the Bedouins of Arabia, became Christianized and Syrianized, adopting the Aramaic language of Syria without, however, abandoning their Arabic tongue. Thus all these groups were bilingual, speaking both Arabic and the local language, and they came to be described by Arabic sources as Arabized (mustaribah), to connect them to butalso differentiate them from the real Arabs (arab). In Hira there were schools for learning both Persian (spoken and written) and Arabic (Isfahani 2002: 2:93). Even the Sasanian rulers had Arab scribes who wrote in both Persian and Arabic (Isfahani 2002: 2:94). At the same time, Mecca and Medina were home to non-Arabs as well as a few Arabs who had become bilingual in

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110 G. Osman Syriac and Persian for trade purposes; one such example was one of Muhammads Companions Abd Allah ibn Amr, who used to read Syriac frequently (Ibn Sad 1978: 4:266). With the advent of Islam and the early Muslims series of military expeditions, aimed at fortifying their borders and spreading their religious message, the need for interpreting and thereby bilingualism grew. In a few decisive battles enormous areas had fallen to the Muslims. Syria and Iraq were con quered in 636, and Egypt and Persia by 642. Between 644 and 656 further campaigns in Iraq and North Africa expanded the Muslim empire, which culminated in the West with the conquest of Southern Spain (Andalusia) in 711, and in the East with forays into the Indian subcontinent and Transoxania beginning in 664 and 706 respectively. Already from the time of Muhammad, the need to become familiar with other languages had become apparent. I receive letters from people that I do not like (just) anyone to read, Muham mad told his Companion Zayd ibn Thabit, Can you learn the writing of Syriac? Zayd then reports learning the Syriac script in 17 nights (Ibn Sad 1978: 2:358). Zayd became well-known for his multilingualism, and was reported to have had a working knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Persian. In time, he was dubbed an official interpreter and was deemed superior in his skills. During the conquest of Persia, Muhammads Companion al-Mughirah ibn Shubah, who had been learning some Persian, was present when a prisoner was taken in. The Caliph at the time, Umar ibn al-Khattab (ruled 634644), ordered him Ask him, from what region are you? whereupon al-Mughirah uttered the question correctly, Az kudham ardii? However, as they kept on talking, Umar addressed al-Mughirah saying, I see that you are not at all good at speaking Persian. None of you speaks it well enough without simulating. Then Zayd ibn Thabit arrived and was able to interpret effectively between Umar and the Persian (Tabari 1989: 13:140). During the Muslims military conquests, while there were material advantages in conversion to Islam, such as exemption from the poll-tax (jizya) and the loss of the minority status as a dhimmi, on the whole the rate of conversion was slow and varied (Bulliet 1979). Yet inherent in the spread of both religious and political Islam was the emphasis on the importance of the Arabic language. The Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab reportedly instructed his governors to spread the knowledge of Arabic because it rejuvenates the mind and increases virtue (Yaqut: 1999). As the Muslim Empire expanded, the other languages began to diminish, each becoming a substratal language (a language that influences another one while being supplanted by it). As opposed to during the time of early Islam when Arabic-speakers learned other languages such as Persian, Hebrew, and Aramaic, and translated for the Prophet and Umar ibn al-Khattab, now the Arabs were no longer in need of becoming bilingual. In cases when

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Arabic of the Middle Ages 111 an individual in the Empire had not yet learned Arabic, an interpreter was brought in from the subject population instead. Already in the conquest of Persia we see this transition: during the siege on the city of Nihawand (641), when the leader Simak ibn Ubaid al-Absi took a prisoner who only spoke Persian, he called someone of the subject population (maybe of the Arab tribes who had settled in Iraq) to translate what he said (Baladhuri 1916: 475, 476). Even authors of later written works for the Christian population that were written in Syriac were clearly bilingual in Arabic as well: one such example is the author of The Chronicle of Zuqnin A.D. 488775, who used Arabisms in his Syriac writing where he could just as well have employed familiar Syriac cognates (1999: 28, 29). The bilingual subject populations also found employment in the bureaucracy of the Muslim Empire. Since Greek had remained current in Syria and Palestine as the lingua franca of commerce and business, the Umayyad central administration in Damascus followed Byzantine practices in using Greek as the language of administration, until the above mentioned reforms of Abd alMalik. Therefore, the Umayyads employed in these positions those Arabized individuals who had had long experience with and involvement in Byzantine affairs: the members of the Banu Ghassan tribe whom the Byzantines had used as a political buffer between themselves and the pre-Islamic Bedouin tribes. It was these individuals who also undertook oral informal transmission of Greek works. Even as late as the tenth century, the historian Hamza al-Isfahani (d. after 961) relates that when he needed information on Graeco-Roman history, he asked an old Greek, who had been captured and served as a valet, to translate for him a Greek historical work orally. This was accomplished with the help of the Greeks son, Yumn, who was a fluent Arabic-speaker (Rosenthal 1968: 74). As time went on and formal education endeavors for the teaching of Arabic came to exist alongside ones for teaching Christian liturgical languages such as Syriac and Greek, the minority groups took advantage of them to improve their professional status, thereby growing their knowledge of the source and target languages as well. 2. The development of translation As the Muslim Empire expanded, in time, Arabic became the dominant spoken tongue. By the tenth century, the Coptic bishop Severus of Eshumnein complained that most of the Egyptian Coptic Christians despite not having converted to Islam no longer understood their liturgical language of Greek or their previous mother tongue of Coptic, and were only able to communicate in Arabic. It was the Arabic language that was becoming a binding factor for the Muslim Empire. It was during the first couple of centuries after the spread of

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112 G. Osman Islam that translation activities reached their peak, under first the Umayyad dynasty (ruled 661750) and then more significantly under the Abbasid dynasty (ruled 7501258); they continued at this apogee for another three centuries. Rulers spearheaded a movement to Arabicize bureaucratic structures and scientific texts that had previously existed in other languages, and thus the translation movement was begun. The first bureaucratic endeavor, mentioned above, was the shifting of thebureaucracy away from Greek in the West of the Empire and Persian in the East remnants of the inherited pre-Islamic Byzantine and Sasanian structures to Arabic overall. Abu Thabit Sulayman ibn Sad, in charge of the correspondence during the days of Abd al-Malik, is credited with having translated the records of the West at the behest of the Caliph. In the meantime, in the province of Iraq, under the governorship of al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf (d. 714) the Persian registers were translated into Arabic by Salih ibn Abd al-Rahman, who served as the scribe of al-Hajjajs secretary, writing in Persian and Arabic under his supervision (Al-Nadim 1970: 583). The shift of the bureaucracy to the use of Arabic was a move of manifold significance. However, it was carried out relatively rapidly; reports indicate it spanned a year from start to finish (Al-Nadim 1970: 582, 583). Therefore, while it was thorough in structure, it was not a particularly analytical or selfreflective process. Rather, an awareness of the techniques of translation came with the second state-initiated movement: the gargantuan textual translation endeavors that started from the time of the prince Khalid ibn Yazid ibn Muawiyah (d. 704), and reached their peak during the Abbasid dynasty. Dubbed the Wise Man of the Family of Marwan, Khalid ibn Yazid ibn Muawiyah had a deep interest in alchemy, commanding the translation of relevant works on the subject from Greek and Coptic into Arabic (Al-Nadim 1970: 583). Then, with the Abbasid revolution in 750, the transfer of the seat of the caliphate to Iraq, and the foundation of the city of Baghdad, the cultural orientation of the Muslim Empire shifted. In contrast to the Umayyad capital of Damascus with its strong Byzantine influence, Iraq and the new capital of Baghdad were home to a completely different demographic population mix. This included Christian and Jewish Aramaic-speakers who formed the majority of the settled population; Persian-speakers, concentrated primarily in the cities; partly sedentarized, Christian Arabs such as those of Hira; partly nomadic Arabs in the grazing grounds of northern Iraq; and, of course, the Arab Muslims concentrated especially in Baghdad, the trading center of Mosul and the original garrison cities of Kufa and Basra. The classical Islamic civilization that came to be associated with the Abbasid era, including the translation movement, was, as Dimitri Gutas explains, the result of the fermentation of all the divergent ingredients which their various backgrounds, beliefs, practices, and values provided (1998: 19). Caliphs began to focus on translation as

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Arabic of the Middle Ages 113 a source of scientific scholarship: Harun al-Rashid (ruled 763809) routinized and enlarged translation activity, officially appointing a translator of Persian works, a member of the Nawbakht family, most of whom would come to be appointed in this capacity. While the translation movement was also present inthe Muslim west, it tended to lag behind that of the east (Goodman 1990: 482). The translation efforts culminated in the Caliph al-Mamuns (ruled 813 833) creation of Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), a Baghdad-based monumental library and translation institute. Al-Mamun used his contacts with the Byzantine emperor to ask that rulers permission to obtain a selection of old scientific manuscripts, stored and treasured in the Byzantine lands. When the Emperor finally complied with the request, al-Mamun sent forth a group of men, among whom were key translators, as well as the director of Bayt alHikma himself, to bring what to the Muslims were rare books and unusual compositions about philosophy, geometry, music, arithmetic, and medicine but today are thought of as classical Greek works on the subjects. Al-Mamun placed these in the library of Bayt al-Hikma, and employed the best scholars of the time to translate and annotate them (Al Nadim 1970: 585). At first, astronomical and medical works were the focus of interest and formed the vast majority of the texts translated and used by professionals, then in time other texts, especially philosophical works, came to be translated from Greek or Syriac into Arabic (Endress 1997: 6465). Subsequent caliphs expanded the efforts even further. Al-Mutadid (ruled 892902), for example, appears to have been particularly interested in the Greek sciences. The son of a Greek woman, he could speak the Greek of his time, and was also close to the luminaries of the translation movement, including Ishaq ibn Hunayn and Thabit ibn Qurra, discussed below (Al Nadim 1970: 590). The secretaries (kuttab) of the Abbasid administration and related state functionaries constituted from the very beginning one of the most important social groups who patronized and promoted the translations and works based on them. Translators were often also supported by independent patrons. The three Banu Musa brothers, who were of humble origins but who had been educated by one of the leading astronomers of Bayt al-Hikma and had become the most famous mathematicians of their age, paid the best translators such as Hunayn ibn Ishaq, Hubaysh ibn al-Hasan, and Thabit ibn Qurra (see below), about five hundred gold coins per month, and they financed expeditions to Byzantine territory to search for manuscripts (Al-Nadim 1970: 585). This pay attracted the best in the field, provided motivation for translators to improve their language skills, and propelled the translation movement forward in other ways. For example, as time went on, translations came to take place more rapidly: The medieval biographer Ibn Khallikan (1998: 4:151) reported that

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114 G. Osman Abu Hamid al-Ghazalis (d. 1111) well-known Nasihat al-Muluk (Advice for kings) came to be translated from Persian to Arabic almost as soon as the Persian original appeared. 3. The translators In his Fihrist, the Persian bibliographer Al-Nadim (d. 995 or 998) presents an exhaustive list of 70 main translators of the Muslim Empire, who provided translations from Persian, Greek, Syriac and even Indian languages. These begin with Stephen al-Qadim, who translated books on alchemy and other sub jects for the prince Khalid ibn Yazid ibn Mu awiyah (d. 704), and continue until al-Nadims own time. Some of the translators also served as interpreters, as was the case with al-Hajjaj ibn Matar, who interpreted for the Caliph al-Mamun and also translated Ptolemys Almagest and works by the Greek mathematician Euclid (Al-Nadim 1970: 586). Al-Nadims list of translators reveals some striking patterns. The first of these is the preponderance of entire families of translators. This occurred even in the pre-Bayt al-Hikma era, as in the case of al-Bitriq who translated some of the ancient books for the Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur, and his son, Abu Zakariya Yahya ibn al-Bitriq (Al-Nadim 1970: 588). On al-Nadims list is most of the above-mentioned Nawbakht family who had become official translators of the court under the caliph Harun al-Rashid (Al-Nadim 1970: 651). A third instance is that of the brothers Musa and Yusuf, the sons of Khalid, who translated from Persian into Arabic (Al-Nadim 1970: 589). The second noteworthy characteristic is the frequent presence in al-Nadims list of religious figures, who were probably intermediaries in the translation process. For example, among the Translators of Persia was Bahram ibn Mardan Shah, the priest of the city of Nisabur (Al-Nadim 1970: 589). In the earlier era when there were fewer translators, Abbasid patrons approached clerics in their official capacity to aid with translation efforts, presumably requesting that they delegate the translation task to appropriate individuals. However, as the demand for Graeco-Arabic translations grew because of the needs of scientists and philosophers, so did the supply and competence of translators. Bilinguals from religious minorities who had known languages especially Greek for liturgical purposes now set out to deepen their knowledge of the language. These later translators from Greek and Syriac themselves belonged to the Christian churches dominant in the Fertile Crescent: Melkites or Orthodox, like al-Bitriq and his son Yahya; Jacobites; and Nestorians, like the family of Hunayn ibn-Ishaq (for more on this see Gutas [1998: 137]). Third is the role that scientists in general played in the translation movement. For example, Ibn Dahn al-Hindi, who administered the renowned

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Arabic of the Middle Ages 115 Baghdad Hospital (Bimaristan), translated from the Indian languages into rabic (Al-Nadim 1970: 590). Masarjis, a physician, translated from Syriac to A Arabic (Al-Nadim 1970: 698). Practicing medicine at the court were families of physicians with origins in Jundishapur whose mother tongue was Persian, whose liturgical and scientific language was Syriac, and who naturally spoke the lingua franca of Arabic. These individuals engaged in medical research, wrote medical textbooks, and commissioned translations. As caliphal physicians of high social status, they had a stake in maintaining their scientific superiority, and thus were eager to amass as much medical expertise as possible (Gutas 1998: 118). Families and professional groups were two collectives in the translation field that naturally brought translators together. Also, translators were in contact with each other personally through visits, correspondence, or more significantly, via circles of translators. For example, the famous Abbasid-era philosopher, al-Kindi (d. shortly after 870), had such a circle. The son of alBitriq, Abu Zakariya Yahya ibn al-Bitriq, belonged to the translation group of al-Mamuns chief minister (vizier) al-Hasan ibn Sahl (Al-Nadim 1970: 588). Probably the most well-known translator in al-Nadims list is Hunayn ibn Ishaq (Joannitius in Greek, d. 873), referred to as the sheikh of the translators and reported by medieval writers to have been the most industrious of them. Hunayn is credited with an immense number of translations, ranging from medicine, philosophy, astronomy, and mathematics to magic and oneiromancy. In his Risalat Hunayn ibn Ishaq ila Ali ibn Yahya fi dhikr ma turjima min Kutub Jalinus bi-Ilmihi wa BaD ma lam yutarjam (Hunayn ibn Ishaqs letter to Ali ibn Yahya mentioning which of Galens books according to his knowledge have been translated and which have not; henceforth abbreviated as Risala), Hunayn enumerates 129 titles, of which he himself translated about 100 into Syriac and/or Arabic, and this list is not even an exhaustive one of all his translations (Hunayn 1966). Son of a Nestorian Arab pharmacist of Hira, Hunayn mastered the four most useful languages of his time, Greek, Syriac, Persian, and Arabic. Hunayn mayhave been trilingual from his youth, for Arabic was the vernacular of his native town, Persian a frequently-used tongue in his region, and Syriac the language of the liturgy and of higher Christian education. Eager to maintain a sound knowledge of Arabic grammar, he is even said to have studied it at Basra. Like other translators, he studied medicine at Baghdads Bayt alHikma;subsequently he traveled for two years to the lands of the Byzantines (bilad al-Rum), and returned to Baghdad a fluent Greek speaker. He became chief physician to the Caliph al-Mutawakkil (ruled 821861), who is said to have supported a translation institute under him, but he preferred to work for independent patrons, such as the Banu Musa brothers. Both the Caliph and the Banu Musa brothers often commissioned Hunayn to obtain works of

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116 G. Osman cholarship for translation from Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and even Byzantine s lands (Al-Nadim 1970: 693). True to the pattern of several family members simultaneous work as translators, Hunayn engaged in his translation efforts two members of his family, his son Ishaq and his nephew Hubaysh ibn al-Hasan al-Asam, as well as several other disciples such as Thabit ibn Qurra. Since some of them did not understand Greek well enough, they made Syriac translations after Hunayns Arabic, or, much more often, Arabic translations after Hunayns Syriac (AlNadim 1970: 699). Hunayn exercised control throughout his career over the output of his disciples, but their work should not be underrated. Hubaysh, for example, was an important medical translator, and it was Ishaq, Hubaysh and one of Hunayns other disciples who took primary responsibility for translating philosophic and mathematical materials, including nearly all of Aristotles works (Goodman 1990: 487). Al-Nadim points out that Ishaqs Arabic was in fact superior to his fathers (1970: 700). Another very well-known figure was the Syro-Palestinian Greek, Qusta ibn Luqa, or Constantine the son of Loukas (d. 912), one of the few translators who was a native Greek-speaker. He left his home of Balabakk (modern-day Lebanon) in search of fame and fortune as a translator in Baghdad. In order to further his cause, he even took with him Greek manuscripts that he believed rich patrons in Baghdad would wish to have translated. Eventually Qusta undertook some translations and, due to his superior literary style in Greek, Syriac, and Arabic, he also corrected many translations that others had carried out (Al-Nadim 1970: 588). Prolific translators from Persian to Arabic included the pioneer of literary prose translation Ibn al-Muqaffa (d. c. 756), translator of the Indian Kalila wa Dimna (Sanskrit Panchatantra) from Middle Persian toArabic, and Muhammad ibn Khalaf ibn al-Marzuban (d. 921), a poet, his torian, biographer and genealogist from the village of al-Muhawwal, west of Baghdad, who translated at least 50 books from Persian to Arabic (Isfahani 2002: 5:260, 9:327). 4. Techniques of translation The translators of al-Nadims list varied dramatically in their language abilities and translation capabilities. By the late eighth century, however, translation activities followed a unified path that incorporated seven main characteristics, all of which point to the recognition of translation as a complex, multi-faceted task, an aspect that had not been appreciated up until that point. These are: (1) a reliance on a multi-step / multi-language translation process; (2) a reliance on multiple copies of a source language text; (3) a reliance on a system of intratranslator corrections to ensure accuracy of the finished product; (4) a convic-

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Arabic of the Middle Ages 117 tion of the importance of sound translation methodology; (5) a shift from a more literal approach to more of an ad sensum approach to translation; (6) the adoption of new terminology; and (7) the adoption of new alphabet forms. Each of these approaches is examined in more detail below. 4.1. Reliance on a multi-step / multi-language translation process During the earliest phase of the translation movement, under the late Umay yads and the very early Abbasids, the Arabs knew no Greek and were thereby forced to adopt a multi-step / multi-language translation process. Greek documents would be translated first into Syriac, and then from Syriac to Arabic. Even during later translation efforts this was the case; for example, since few of Hunayns disciples had their teachers mastery of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic, the translation of texts was often via a multi-step process. Thus, Aristotles Topica was translated first into Syriac by Ishaq ibn Hunayn and the Sophistici by Ibn Naimah and Abu Bishr Matta, after which Yahya ibn Adi rendered both these Syriac versions into Arabic (Al-Nadim 1970: 600). In a few cases, books were translated from Greek to Arabic, then from Arabic to Syriac. This was the case with Galens book on chest and lung movement, which Stefan ibn Basil translated first into Arabic for one of the Musa brothers, after which Hubaysh translated it from Arabic to Syriac (Hunayn 1966: 2324). Similarly, an account of Aristotles Analytica Priora was translated from Greek into Arabic by the well-known Theodore the Commentator. Theodore showed his translation to Hunayn, who corrected it, then translated a portion into Syriac while his son Ishaq translated the remainder (Al-Nadim 1970: 599). Sometimes Hunayn himself translated from Greek directly to Arabic, as he did with Galens treatise on sound (Hunayn 1966: 24). Occasionally, very skilled translators also rendered the Greek into Syriac and Arabic simultaneously. Hunayn did this with another of Galens treatises that was also commissioned by one of the Musa brothers (Hunayn 1966: 42). Another translator, Theon, did the same with some of Aristotles works (Al-Nadim 1970: 598). Such a multi-step process undoubtedly widened the gap between the original Greek and the third generation translation (usually Arabic but sometimes Syriac). Therefore, other techniques such a reliance on multiples copies of a test and a reliance on a system of intra-translator corrections were crucial in ensuring an accurate rendering of the source text into the target language. 4.2. Reliance on multiple copies of a source language text When multiple copies of a source language text were available, these were compared against each other before a translation was undertaken. In his Risala

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118 G. Osman Hunayn explains that he used to collect as many Greek manuscripts as possible and to collate them in order to have a sound textual basis for the translation (1996b: 2). His son, Ishaq ibn Hunayn, thirty years after having translated the exposition of Themistius into Arabic from a manuscript that was in poor shape, found a manuscript that was in far better condition and compared it with the first translation (Al-Nadim 1970: 605). When multiple copies of a manuscript were absent but commentaries on an original were available, faithful translators cited these to buttress their translation. For example, Ibn Tibbon (d. 1230), frustrated at Ibn al-Bitriqs weak Arabic rendering of Aristotles Meterology, continuously interrupted his translation of the work into Hebrew to quote available commentaries on the Greek original with the preface so and so says here.... When finished with the relevant commentary quotation, he would faithfully explain, I will return to the place from which I left off (Fontaine 1997: 88). 4.3. Reliance on a system of intra-translator corrections It was a frequent practice for translators to check the exact meaning of their document in the source language before they embarked on its translation. For example, when Yahya ibn Khalid ibn Barmak decided to translate Ptolemys Almagest into Arabic, he sought the help of those around him regarding some ambiguous phrases; dissatisfied with some of the results of this investigation, he called upon the director of the Bayt al-Hikma. The director in turn summoned the best translators and asked their opinions. Once Yahya had completed the translation, this group of translators tested the translation, ensuring its good literary style and accuracy (Al-Nadim 1970: 639). This model of checking the quality of a translation after its completion with those who were more knowledgeable was a very common one. Early translations had accordingly to be retouched and corrected stylistically (islah) by speakers of correct Arabic, like the philosopher al-Kindi, while later renderings were checked immediately upon their completion. The Syriac-Arabic translator Midlaji (Marlahi), a contemporary of al-Nadim who had a good knowledge of Syriac, but stammered in pronouncing Arabic (i.e. was not fluent in the language), used always to have his translations checked and at times improved by his patron Ali ibn Ibrahim al-Dahaki (Al Nadim 1970: 588). Hunayns son Ishaq and his nephew Hubaysh consistently gave their translation work to Hunayn for checking. Other translators frequently met with Hunayn so that he could correct their work: one example would be the abovementioned instance (see Section 4.1) when Stefan ibn Basil did so with his translation from Greek to Arabic of Galens book on chest and lung movement (Hunayn 1966: 2324).

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Arabic of the Middle Ages 119 Hunayn recounts one instance in which a translator thought that he could get away with an easier method. When the translator Sulamwayhi wished to improve on Sergiuss Greek-Syriac translation of Galens work on fevers Sergius had translated the first portion of the work while still inexperienced in the craft of translation, according to Hunayn he met with Hunayn, handing him the Greek original. Sulamwayhi then read to Hunayn the Syriac and whenever he read something that was contrary to the Greek original, Hunayn notified him of the discrepancy and he corrected it. Eventually, Sulamwayhi came to realize how time consuming this process was, and it became apparent to him that translating from the start was more comfortable, more eloquent, and more organized, so he asked Hunayn to translate these final pieces for him (Hunayn 1966: 18). Hunayn clearly disapproved of Sulamwayhis attempt at a short cut. Also interesting in the account is Hunayns recognition of the role of experience in generating more accurate translations, an aspect that will be explored further below. When the final product was deemed inappropriate after such labors, the court or other patrons sometimes commissioned a second version. Such was the case with the Synagoge of Anatolius, of which Yahya ibn Khalid ibn Barmak commissioned a Greek-Arabic translation in 795 from the Patriarch of Alexandra, the bishop of Damascus, and the monk Eustathius. Unhappy with the resulting work, Yahya authorized a second translation, this time from a Syriac rendering of the work (Gutas 1998: 115). Such re-comissioning of a work points to the importance of the quality of translations to the Abbasids. Because of this, serious translators such as Hunayn spent much effort improving his and others translations, especially when they had been commissioned by a person of exceptional learning and culture. At the beginning of his Risala, Hunayn stressed that it is important to know for whom a work was translated in order to evaluate its quality (1966: 2).As Rosenthal (1947: 41) points out, in general, for Muslim scholars, the more scholarly a work was, the greater care was exercised by scholars in the indication and quotation of their sources. 4.4. From literal to ad sensum translation At the start of the Abbasid era, translators tended toward a strictly literal translation, proceeding through a source text word by word. When they could not determine an exact equivalent for a source language word, they would often simply transliterate it. This literal, word-by-word technique was particularly common in Syriac translations from the Greek, and in Hebrew and Latin translations from the Arabic. From the time of Hunayn, however, translators came to recognize the sentence as the unit of meaning and translated ad sensum, and

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120 G. Osman both theory and practice came to be greatly in favor of a translation technique that considered it the main task of the translator to render the meaning of the translated work in an accurate manner. According to Hunayns understanding, one of the primary qualities that defined a source text was the use for which it was consulted, and the obligation of the target text, therefore, would be to reproduce those particular features. Thus, Hunayn pondered the problems of translation and arrived at the conclusion that a translator should try to find expressions which were close to the original, but at the same time should not do violence to the idiomatic usage ofthe language into which he translated (1966: 4, 5, 6; cf. Hugonnard-Roche 1990). Only in one respect did Hunayn not focus on either a literal or an adsensum approach: like other Christian translators he felt the obligation to eliminate all traces of paganism from the works of the ancients, replacing anymention of pagan gods by the one God and His angels (EI2 19542008: 579). 4.5. The adoption of new terminology While many initial writings in early Islamic times incorporated words from other languages Abul-Faraj al-Isfahani (d. 967) often points out words that are Arabized Persian such as qahraman and dakhdar (2002: 2:102, 103) from the first bureaucratic endeavors efforts were made to coin appropriate Arabic terms. When Salih ibn Abd al-Rahman undertook the translation of the registers from Persian to Arabic, he had to consider how he would render Persian phrases related to taxation such as dahwiyah (tithe) and shashwiya (a 6% tax or levy), and decided to use the Arabic words ushr (tenth) and nusf ushr (half of a tenth) (Baladhuri 1916: 466; Al-Nadim 1970: 583). The second was obviously not an exact rendering, but represented an effort towards a more thorough Arabicization that excluded loanwords as much as possible. Similarly, in part due to the incentive provided by the munificence of their sponsors, the translators of the Abbasid era worked to develop new Arabic terminology. With the shift to an ad sensum approach, Hunayn ibn Ishaq and his school now avoided mere transcriptions and even loose paraphrase and summary as much as possible, instead focusing on developing an Arabic technical vocabulary and style for scientific discourse. In his early writings Hunayn had pointed to the dearth of adequate nomenclature in Arabic, compared to Syriac, Greek, and Persian (Goodman 1990: 488; Gutas 1998: 141; EI2 19542008: 578). Likewise, al-Kindis circle worked at the formation of a philosophical language in Arabic, an achievement of linguistic and conceptual transformation that al-Kindi systematized in a glossary of philosophical terms and definitions (Endress 1997: 49).

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Arabic of the Middle Ages 121 4.6. The adoption of new alphabet forms Hand in hand with the development of new scientific and philosophical terminology came the adaptation of the Arabic script to allow for the expression of foreign sounds. A pupil of al-Kindi, Ahmad ibn al-Tayyib al-Sarahshi, invented a special alphabet of forty characters that he used for the transcription of Persian, Syriac, and Greek words. Ibn Khaldun, confronted with the problem of expressing in Arabic characters Berber sounds that had no Arabic equivalent, used Arabic letters with extra points above or below (Ibn Khaldun 2005: 34; Rosenthal 1947: 25, 26). 4.7. The need for translation skills The above mentioned account of Sergiuss gradual improvement as a translator demonstrates Hunayns view that it is not enough to know the source and target languages. Rather, Sergiuss translation of the first portion of the work had been weak because he was still a novice, while his translation of the eight remaining articles was after he had become trained, so his translation of it was more accurate than his translation of the first part. Perhaps Hunayn had come to this realization through his own journey: as he had become more experienced, he noted that his first attempts at translating technical works had been faulty, and he returned to rework them (Hunayn 1966: 6, 18). While the notion of the necessity of careful training for persons who wished to devote themselves to the difficult art of translation was raised early on by the eighth century Syriac writer, Phocas of Edessa, whose lifetime coincided with the beginning of Arabic translation literature (Rosenthal 1947: 29), this was a viewpoint regarding translation not routinely available in other translation contexts such as the Christian monasteries where many of these translators had been educated in Greek and/or Syriac. This self-reflective look at and recognition of the complexity of a translators work was a new understanding that had been generated by the translation movement itself (Gutas 1998: 141). 5. Issues in contemporary translation: a brief comparison While the field of contemporary Arabic Translation Studies includes numerous works on what constitutes an effective translation (e.g. El Zeini 1994; Massoud 1998; Abdellah 2002), the subject of the challenges encountered in translating to and from Arabic is still relatively virgin territory compared to its counterparts in other languages. As pointed out by Shehadeh Fareh in his article Some textual problems in translating Arabic into English (2006: 100), while such

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122 G. Osman challenges appear to have been investigated by several researchers, many of these studies were Ph.D. or M.A. theses that focused on general problems encountered in translating from Arabic to English. One such study by Najah Shamma (1978), A linguistic analysis of some problems of Arabic to English translation, for example, is more of an error analysis study. Therefore, more studies are needed to analyze translation methodology characteristics from and into Arabic, and in fact, the classical works provide a good introduction in this direction. As an aside, the striking propensity for modern works on Arabic translation to engage in the type of error analysis described above in Shammas study is in many ways similar to the focus of classical works on criticizing translators poor Arabic skills, as evidenced by Jahizs (d. 869) and al-Nadims manifold critiques on the subject (Jahiz 1969: 104, 105; Al-Nadim 1970). The earliest translations in particular showed very poor Arabic style, as translators were ultimately translating into a second or even third language, the level of which was lagging behind the Arabic styles that their contemporary grammarians and stylists were extolling as proper Arabic. Al-Bitriq and his son Yayha, both with roots in the Hellenized Fertile Crescent and two of the most prolific translators of philosophical works (Endress 1997: 55), had a reputation for their defective styles (Al-Nadim 1970: 603, 605); Al-Nadim and other writers criticize several other translators for this fault as well (1970: 588). The few recent studies focusing on methodology that veer away from the error analysis model highlight characteristics an awareness of which we saw in the medieval texts above. For example, Abdellah (2002) suggests four major macro-skills that a translator should possess in order to render an effective translation. These are: reading comprehension, researching, analytical, and composing skills. The medieval works point to the thoroughness of the translators at each of these stages. We hear of how Khalid ibn Yahya made sure that he thoroughly understood the content of Almagest, even resorting to a second round of consultation with those at Bayt al-Hikma to ensure that his comprehension of the source text was correct. Translators searched for multiple versions of a source text, in order to make sure that the original they were translating was correct. Particularly impressive are the efforts of the medieval translators when it came to the analytical and composing stages. Abdellah divides the analytical stage into two: analysis, during which the translator refers to the prototext in order to understand it as fully as possible, and synthesis, during which the prototext is projected onto the reader, or rather, onto the idea that the translator forms of who will be the most likely reader of the metatext. Again we have seen how medieval translators made sure that they thoroughly understood the source text; we have also witnessed the efforts of translators such as Hunayn ibn Ishaq to understand the purpose of a text, and therefore the characteristics of its intended audience. Finally, Abdellah also divides the

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Arabic of the Middle Ages 123 composition stage into two parts. The first is to externalize the set of impressions caused by the text and translate into speech elements the impressions the mind produced by contact with the prototext, while the second is to make this product coherent within itself, i.e., transform the set of speech elements into a text (the metatext). The classical translators painstaking efforts to render their texts ad sensum, while at the same time avoiding vague and loose translations and instead resorting to the invention of a new terminology and even a new alphabet structure, are a testament to their focus on this element. Fareh (2006: 99) notes problems in translations to and from Arabic relatingto vagueness, ambiguity, wordiness, repetition, fragmentation, improper punctuation, unparalleled structures, redundancy, referential versatility and lack of connectivity in Arabic texts. Improper punctuation aside, these problems are very similar to ones that were addressed by Hunayn when correcting others translations (1966: 4, 6). Hunayn and those around him, as we saw above, were very concerned to render the source text accurately without giving in to loose interpretations or opaque renderings. Fareh highlights the need for translators to be fully competent in both the source and target languages as well as in translation methodology, something that he believes is lacking currently (2006: 99). Likewise, medieval translators such as Hunayn emphasized that a translator had to be equally well-versed in two languages, that the translators knowledge of the authors branch of learning had to match that of the author himself, and that the stylistic ability of the translator was not to be inferior to that of the author (Hunayn 1966: 3). 6. Conclusion M. G. Carter (2004: 144) points out that Linguistics has always had a political dimension and this is more than ever true with a language and a religion so tightly bound together as Islam and Arabic. From the start the rapid spread of Islam was immediately connected to the growth of Arabic and the displacement and settlement of native Arabic speakers into the peripheries of the Muslim Empire. Among other linguistic consequences, this led to an immediate need for interpreters, and subsequently translators, who at first carried out their work in a fairly informal manner. After government-instigated bureaucratic and scientific translation projects brought a translation movement into being, much more thought was given by Muslim scholars to the problem of translation. It was realized a work in translation not only suffered a great aesthetic loss, but also a change in meaning. Therefore the translation movement, as it became more sophisticated by the end of the eighth century, came to embody a set of well-defined characteristics that demarcated its methodology across the Muslim Empire. These characteristics embody much of what recent works in

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124 G. Osman the emerging field of Arabic Translation Studies has outlined, and they therefore serve as an important launching pad for these studies. San Diego State University Correspondence address: osman@mail.sdsu.edu References
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Arabic of the Middle Ages 125


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