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Xuanzang
Born
For the Cheng Weishi Lun, Xuanzang combined several Indian commentaries into one Chinese work. His student Kuiji later recalled suggesting that the team bring them together. That decision gave readers a way to approach the arguments in one text, with a scholar’s judgment about which interpretations to emphasize.
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Kumārajīva
The Chinese Lotus Sutra associated with Kumarajiva became a text that readers across East Asia could study and recite. The sutra had already been translated into Chinese, so its reach also tells a story about the life a particular version can have after it leaves the translator’s hands.
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Hunayn ibn Ishaq
Hunayn compared manuscripts when translating Galen. In his account of earlier versions, he also recorded who had translated what and into which language. Read about his circle to see why some Greek medical writing reached Arabic readers through Syriac and why a new translation could start with work done generations before.
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Ibn al-Muqaffa'
The animal fables of Kalila and Dimna traveled from Indian sources through Middle Persian before Ibn al-Muqaffa brought them into Arabic. His version gave the two jackals new readers. Comparing surviving manuscripts also shows how hard it is to recover one translator’s wording after centuries of copying and adaptation.
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Gerard of Cremona
Gerard translated Ptolemy’s Almagest from Arabic into Latin in Toledo. For a Latin reader, the result made a major work of Greek astronomy available through an Arabic tradition. The route matters because translators were carrying a text already shaped by other scholars’ choices.
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William Tyndale
Tyndale translated the New Testament from Greek into English. Wording from his work and his Hebrew Bible translations later made its way into the King James Bible. It is a particularly clear example of a translator’s language reaching readers who may never see the earlier version it came from.
More about William Tyndale7
Martin Luther
Luther began translating the New Testament into German at the Wartburg. An edition of his Bible preserved there also carries handwritten changes by Luther and his collaborators. Those marks make the translation look like work in progress, even after readers could buy it in print.
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Émilie du Châtelet
Born
Du Châtelet translated Newton’s Principia into French and wrote a commentary. Her treatment of the tides drew on Daniel Bernoulli’s work, and her discussion of the Earth’s shape drew on Clairaut. Those additions gave French readers a way to follow what other mathematicians had made of Newton’s arguments.
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Yan Fu
Born
Yan Fu turned Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics into Tianyan lun for Chinese readers. Looking at how he handled passages about society makes clear that a translation can do more than introduce a text. It can make that text part of a debate the original author was never in.
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Richard Wilhelm (sinologist)
Born
Wilhelm translated the I Ching from Chinese into German. Cary F. Baynes later used his version as the basis for an English translation. It is worth following both steps to see how a book can find a new readership through a translator working from an earlier translation.
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Cary Baynes
Baynes made her English I Ching from Richard Wilhelm’s German translation. Her name on the edition makes an intermediate step visible. An English reader can see that the wording has a history in both the Chinese original and the German text that Baynes worked from.
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Constance Garnett
Born
Garnett’s English translation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is still reprinted. Set it beside another English version if you want to hear how a translator’s choices about pace and register change the experience of entering the same novel.
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