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Science in Translation: Movements of Knowledge through Cultures and Time
In this innovative work, Scott L. Montgomery explores the diverse roles that translation has played in the development of science from antiquity to the present—from the Arabic translations of Greek and Latin texts whose reintroduction to Europe was crucial to the Renaissance, to the origin and evolution of modern science in Japan.
"[A] book of great richness, as much for its examples as for its ideas, which keenly illustrate the development of knowledge across languages and epochs. It is a book to read and reread. Its subject is important; it is ours, it is our history." -André Clas, Journal des Traducteurs
"[T]his book . . . seems to stand alone on the shelf. A good thing, therefore, that it is so full of good things, both in the content and the prose." —William R. Everdell, MAA Online
"[A]n impressive work. . . . By reminding us of the role of diverse cultures in the elevation of science within a particular nation or civilization, the book makes a substantial contribution to the postmodern worldview that emphasizes multiculturalism." — Choice
"[A] book of great richness, as much for its examples as for its ideas, which keenly illustrate the development of knowledge across languages and epochs. It is a book to read and reread. Its subject is important; it is ours, it is our history." -André Clas, Journal des Traducteurs
"[T]his book . . . seems to stand alone on the shelf. A good thing, therefore, that it is so full of good things, both in the content and the prose." —William R. Everdell, MAA Online
"[A]n impressive work. . . . By reminding us of the role of diverse cultures in the elevation of science within a particular nation or civilization, the book makes a substantial contribution to the postmodern worldview that emphasizes multiculturalism." — Choice
337 pages, Paperback
First published June 15, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 27, 2024
This was dense, but surprisingly good and interesting.
January 9, 2026
A great book about the creation, spread, and effects of scientific knowledge in different cultures throughout history.
Scott Montgomery introduces and describes this book as, "a combination of several intentions and efforts. It is, first of all and most fundamentally, a proposal: simply put, that translation be allowed its crucial role in the history of scientific knowledge—ancient, medieval and modern—as a subject worthy of diverse inquiry. Secondly, I have tried to demonstrate the validity of this claim through a range of case study examples revealing of the powers translation has commanded in the building of Western science... I admit that for more than ten years I myself labored in the salt mines of scientific translation, if only on a part-time basis... Such experience was enough to reveal that translation is involved at every level of knowledge production and distribution in the sciences. Yet, for the interested analyst or reader, it remained a ghost in the machine. There was no evidence of sustained inquiry in this area, no field or subfield that examines what translation means and has meant in the history of science... The topic represents a notable gap; this book is an attempt to begin closing it." (ix-x).
There are many ways that a culture influences the translation of a work. A few of them are shown through the preference of certain materials for translation, the amount of respect given to the material or its author, the type of translation (word-for-word, sense-for-sense translation or some mixture of the two), the access to a vocabulary for expression in the target language (it may not have an existing word or concept in it yet), the acceptability of a work for the receiving culture, and the translator’s own interests.
One example of the translators’ interests is shown by the translation of Western scientific works into China and Japan:
“A large percentage of the earliest books on Western science imported to Japan were those written in Chinese by Jesuit missionaries during the early 1600s. These books were intended to help secure a favorable position for the missionaries with China’s emperor and his court, and to no small degree they did just that. For a full 150 years, the Jesuits were the primary—at times the only—translators of Western scientific thought to China. Obviously enough, this was a position of enormous historical import, which the missionaries well recognized. The famous Matteo Ricci, one of their earlier leaders, wrote more than thirty separate works dealing with occidental science, mainly astronomy and helped establish a pattern followed throughout the seventeenth century that kept the Jesuits in partial favor. But the missionaries, no less than their counterparts in Europe, could not escape the effects of the Counter-Reformation, with its condemnations of Copernicus and Galileo, However far from Rome to Peking, the distance was easily crossed by Western ships bringing news of the Church's injunction of 1616 against the teaching of heliocentrism. The Results for Chinese science appear to have been something near to tragedy. In the Words of Nathan Sivin:
‘Jesuit Missionaries, who alone were in a position to introduce contemporary scientific ideas into China before the nineteenth century, were not permitted to discuss the concept of a sun-centered planetary system after 1616. Because they wanted to honor Copernicus, they characterized his world system in misleading ways. When a Jesuit was free to correctly describe it in 1760, Chinese scientists rejected the heliocentric system because it contradicted earlier statements about Copernicus. No European writer resolved their doubts by admitting that some of the earlier assertions about Copernicus had been untrue… To the very end of the Jesuit scientific effort in China, the rivalry between cosmologies was represented as between one astronomical innovator and another for the most convenient and accurate methods of calculation… The character of early modern science was concealed from Chinese scientists, who depended on Jesuit writings. (1995, 4.1)’
“No work by Copernicus or Galileo, Kepler or Newton, Descartes or Huygens was ever directly translated into Chinese by the missionaries. Instead, they wrote their own treatises, strategically simplifying and deforming the actual record; in a very few cases they rendered works by Jesuit astronomers, such as Christopher Clavius. The greatest of ‘the moderns’ was said to by Tycho Brahe, and the sum total of European astronomy, as put by one Jesuit author around 1640, ‘in its essentials has not gone beyond the bounds [set] by Ptolemy’ (Sivin 1995, 4.21). The historical position of Copernicus, meanwhile, was changed into that of a later entry in a line of medieval thinkers whose work had been refined, updated, and rendered obsolete by Tycho. A century later, when Newton’s great Principia Mathematica was being popularized throughout Europe and the Roman Church wore its old condemnation as a public symbol of intellectual defeat and backwardness, the Chinese remained convinced of a pre-Copernican universe. Through the power of their writings—through their decision not to translate, but to rewrite the texts of occidental astronomy—the Jesuits helped make the Earth stand still in China
“Japan’s ban on Western books, which began in 1630, may thus have had a beneficial side to it. Certainly one of the main targets of censorship was the so-called Ricci corpus, which included nearly two dozen individual works. A blanket statement along these lines, however, would obviously be wrong: these works included valuable treatises on mathematics, astronomical instruments, cartography, and other subjects, as well as a partial translation (by Ricci himself) of Euclid’s Elements (Nakayama 1969). No small portion of Western science did enter China, in accurate fashion, at the hands of the Jesuits.
“As it happened, the Jesuits in Japan did not pursue an intellectual and pedagogic policy as did Ricci and his followers in China. Instead, they confined themselves to evangelical work. This left Japanese intellectuals with a choice between neo-Confucian natural history and a handful of Jesuit works on Western science that had arrived before the ban of 1630 and were not proscribed thereafter. The latter did not amount to very much, and Western science did not achieve a particularly significant following at this time. Chinese natural philosophy, with its focus on metaphysical interpretations of the natural world, remained entrenched. Yet, in the wake of thinkers such as Hayashi Razan, this philosophy continued to evolve in the direction of a more materialist sensibility. Indeed, a new focus on ‘things’—butsu—became a hallmark of the next century.” (206-8)
My absolute favorite part of this book was an example of the creation of “definitive” texts, where a translator looks at the pieces of a work that are available, weighs their value, and assembles the pieces into a whole. Often the new edition reveals more about the translator's interests. Montgomery’s view is also that the work so assembled should be considered as a new creation in its own right:
“Such versions, however, always betray themselves in translation. No better example of this can be found, in fact, than in modern English renderings of Pliny, and to some degree Cicero and other authors too. Whereas these Roman authors tended to simplify the language of their Greek source texts, translators of the last two hundred years have exactly the opposite, giving these authors something of a contemporary scientific (Newtonian) vocabulary. Thus, we read in Naturalis Historia of the ‘revolutions,’ ‘orbits,’ and ‘velocity’ of the planets, of water ‘evaporating’ from the Earth’s surface, of the ‘acceleration’ and ‘deceleration’ of certain bodies, and so forth. In one notable case concerning Cicero, the great orator is posed as the sturdy shoulder on which Newton must have stood:
‘Hence, if the world [mundus] is round and therefore all its parts are held together by and with each other in universal equilibrium [undique aequabiles], the same must be the case with the Earth, so that all its parts must converge towards the center… without anything to break the continuity and so threaten its vast complex of gravitational forces [gravitas] and masses with dissolution.’
“Inasmuch as the Roman translation effort was to adapt Greek learning to its own cultural present, so has this exercise been practiced inevitable upon the result.” (48-9)
I imagine this book to be ideal for anyone who studies history since so much of history depends on translation and would be impossible without it. This book is an attempt to outline the ways historical influence can be expressed through a work's translation and should be valuable to a practicing historian.
In summary, this is a fantastic book.
Scott Montgomery introduces and describes this book as, "a combination of several intentions and efforts. It is, first of all and most fundamentally, a proposal: simply put, that translation be allowed its crucial role in the history of scientific knowledge—ancient, medieval and modern—as a subject worthy of diverse inquiry. Secondly, I have tried to demonstrate the validity of this claim through a range of case study examples revealing of the powers translation has commanded in the building of Western science... I admit that for more than ten years I myself labored in the salt mines of scientific translation, if only on a part-time basis... Such experience was enough to reveal that translation is involved at every level of knowledge production and distribution in the sciences. Yet, for the interested analyst or reader, it remained a ghost in the machine. There was no evidence of sustained inquiry in this area, no field or subfield that examines what translation means and has meant in the history of science... The topic represents a notable gap; this book is an attempt to begin closing it." (ix-x).
There are many ways that a culture influences the translation of a work. A few of them are shown through the preference of certain materials for translation, the amount of respect given to the material or its author, the type of translation (word-for-word, sense-for-sense translation or some mixture of the two), the access to a vocabulary for expression in the target language (it may not have an existing word or concept in it yet), the acceptability of a work for the receiving culture, and the translator’s own interests.
One example of the translators’ interests is shown by the translation of Western scientific works into China and Japan:
“A large percentage of the earliest books on Western science imported to Japan were those written in Chinese by Jesuit missionaries during the early 1600s. These books were intended to help secure a favorable position for the missionaries with China’s emperor and his court, and to no small degree they did just that. For a full 150 years, the Jesuits were the primary—at times the only—translators of Western scientific thought to China. Obviously enough, this was a position of enormous historical import, which the missionaries well recognized. The famous Matteo Ricci, one of their earlier leaders, wrote more than thirty separate works dealing with occidental science, mainly astronomy and helped establish a pattern followed throughout the seventeenth century that kept the Jesuits in partial favor. But the missionaries, no less than their counterparts in Europe, could not escape the effects of the Counter-Reformation, with its condemnations of Copernicus and Galileo, However far from Rome to Peking, the distance was easily crossed by Western ships bringing news of the Church's injunction of 1616 against the teaching of heliocentrism. The Results for Chinese science appear to have been something near to tragedy. In the Words of Nathan Sivin:
‘Jesuit Missionaries, who alone were in a position to introduce contemporary scientific ideas into China before the nineteenth century, were not permitted to discuss the concept of a sun-centered planetary system after 1616. Because they wanted to honor Copernicus, they characterized his world system in misleading ways. When a Jesuit was free to correctly describe it in 1760, Chinese scientists rejected the heliocentric system because it contradicted earlier statements about Copernicus. No European writer resolved their doubts by admitting that some of the earlier assertions about Copernicus had been untrue… To the very end of the Jesuit scientific effort in China, the rivalry between cosmologies was represented as between one astronomical innovator and another for the most convenient and accurate methods of calculation… The character of early modern science was concealed from Chinese scientists, who depended on Jesuit writings. (1995, 4.1)’
“No work by Copernicus or Galileo, Kepler or Newton, Descartes or Huygens was ever directly translated into Chinese by the missionaries. Instead, they wrote their own treatises, strategically simplifying and deforming the actual record; in a very few cases they rendered works by Jesuit astronomers, such as Christopher Clavius. The greatest of ‘the moderns’ was said to by Tycho Brahe, and the sum total of European astronomy, as put by one Jesuit author around 1640, ‘in its essentials has not gone beyond the bounds [set] by Ptolemy’ (Sivin 1995, 4.21). The historical position of Copernicus, meanwhile, was changed into that of a later entry in a line of medieval thinkers whose work had been refined, updated, and rendered obsolete by Tycho. A century later, when Newton’s great Principia Mathematica was being popularized throughout Europe and the Roman Church wore its old condemnation as a public symbol of intellectual defeat and backwardness, the Chinese remained convinced of a pre-Copernican universe. Through the power of their writings—through their decision not to translate, but to rewrite the texts of occidental astronomy—the Jesuits helped make the Earth stand still in China
“Japan’s ban on Western books, which began in 1630, may thus have had a beneficial side to it. Certainly one of the main targets of censorship was the so-called Ricci corpus, which included nearly two dozen individual works. A blanket statement along these lines, however, would obviously be wrong: these works included valuable treatises on mathematics, astronomical instruments, cartography, and other subjects, as well as a partial translation (by Ricci himself) of Euclid’s Elements (Nakayama 1969). No small portion of Western science did enter China, in accurate fashion, at the hands of the Jesuits.
“As it happened, the Jesuits in Japan did not pursue an intellectual and pedagogic policy as did Ricci and his followers in China. Instead, they confined themselves to evangelical work. This left Japanese intellectuals with a choice between neo-Confucian natural history and a handful of Jesuit works on Western science that had arrived before the ban of 1630 and were not proscribed thereafter. The latter did not amount to very much, and Western science did not achieve a particularly significant following at this time. Chinese natural philosophy, with its focus on metaphysical interpretations of the natural world, remained entrenched. Yet, in the wake of thinkers such as Hayashi Razan, this philosophy continued to evolve in the direction of a more materialist sensibility. Indeed, a new focus on ‘things’—butsu—became a hallmark of the next century.” (206-8)
My absolute favorite part of this book was an example of the creation of “definitive” texts, where a translator looks at the pieces of a work that are available, weighs their value, and assembles the pieces into a whole. Often the new edition reveals more about the translator's interests. Montgomery’s view is also that the work so assembled should be considered as a new creation in its own right:
“Such versions, however, always betray themselves in translation. No better example of this can be found, in fact, than in modern English renderings of Pliny, and to some degree Cicero and other authors too. Whereas these Roman authors tended to simplify the language of their Greek source texts, translators of the last two hundred years have exactly the opposite, giving these authors something of a contemporary scientific (Newtonian) vocabulary. Thus, we read in Naturalis Historia of the ‘revolutions,’ ‘orbits,’ and ‘velocity’ of the planets, of water ‘evaporating’ from the Earth’s surface, of the ‘acceleration’ and ‘deceleration’ of certain bodies, and so forth. In one notable case concerning Cicero, the great orator is posed as the sturdy shoulder on which Newton must have stood:
‘Hence, if the world [mundus] is round and therefore all its parts are held together by and with each other in universal equilibrium [undique aequabiles], the same must be the case with the Earth, so that all its parts must converge towards the center… without anything to break the continuity and so threaten its vast complex of gravitational forces [gravitas] and masses with dissolution.’
“Inasmuch as the Roman translation effort was to adapt Greek learning to its own cultural present, so has this exercise been practiced inevitable upon the result.” (48-9)
I imagine this book to be ideal for anyone who studies history since so much of history depends on translation and would be impossible without it. This book is an attempt to outline the ways historical influence can be expressed through a work's translation and should be valuable to a practicing historian.
In summary, this is a fantastic book.
August 9, 2018
Fantastic. I bought this book to read about the translation of ancient Greek works on science and mathematics into modern European languages via Syriac, Arabic and Latin, which my university classes touched on back when I was a translation student, and it covers that topic in depth using the example of astronomy. The other sections were also very interesting, particularly the discussions of the development of names for chemical elements in Japanese and the characteristics of scientific papers written in Indian English. The author's academic writing style is very dense in places and so reading this was slow going, but worth it for me.
December 8, 2020
Montgomery really knows how to spin an interesting story out of a rather dry topic.
This is the journey of science from Greece to Rome to the Arabs to Reineccance Europe, with a focus on astronomy. It is also the story of how modern science reached Japan (the focus here shifting to Chemistry).
The journey is concluded with a chapter on how English can be different in different scientific contexts, and the merits of studying science in translation.
I read this for academic purposes, but it was still an enjoyable read.
This is the journey of science from Greece to Rome to the Arabs to Reineccance Europe, with a focus on astronomy. It is also the story of how modern science reached Japan (the focus here shifting to Chemistry).
The journey is concluded with a chapter on how English can be different in different scientific contexts, and the merits of studying science in translation.
I read this for academic purposes, but it was still an enjoyable read.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews