Gundissalinus didn’t read Arabic: philosophy translated through spoken Castilian
I translate between Hebrew and Arabic for a living, mostly contracts, sometimes poetry, so the mechanics of translation are my daily bread. I've just learned a detail about the twelfth-century Toledo translations that I can't stop thinking about.
Dominicus Gundissalinus, the archdeacon who put Ibn Sina's work on the soul and parts of his Healing into Latin, apparently did not read Arabic. He worked with a collaborator, identified in the sources as Avendauth, often taken to be the Jewish philosopher Abraham ibn Daud, though that identification is debated, or else a Johannes Hispanus. The dedication to the Avicenna translation describes the method: the collaborator spoke each word aloud in the vernacular, and the archdeacon turned each into Latin.
So some of the most important philosophy to enter Latin Europe passed from written Arabic through spoken Castilian into written Latin. Two translations, one of them oral, between languages of three faiths.
As a working translator, three things strike me:
- Spoken intermediate translation tends to flatten technical terms, because you reach for the everyday word.
- Word-by-word rendering preserves structure but can lose sense, especially in Arabic, where so much hangs on roots and patterns.
- And yet it worked. Latin scholasticism built a vocabulary out of this process that lasted centuries.
Has anyone looked at what this did to specific terms? And does anyone else work in two-stage translation and recognise the problems?