Re: A Problem To Solve :-)

On 1/28/2024 4:10 PM, Physfitfreak wrote:

On 1/28/2024 3:49 PM, Physfitfreak wrote:

>
So going back to the subject, a translator may lose a lot of stuff in the process of translating from the original, but also can add to it in some ways permissible. It is not always a one-way process of deterioration of the original. It can even get better than the original :) But it all depends on who it is that's doing the translation.

  A stark historic example of this fact is the work, "Almagest" that kharazmi translated from Greek into Arabic (language of science of his time). Kharazmi made many attempts to explain better the concepts that Ptolemy either had not explained enough, or had made small mistakes in. For this reason, the translation of Almagest from Arabic to Latin was used among scientists and astronomers more often than the original Greek one by Ptolemy when it was discovered at last. This original had been lost for like a thousand years. But when discovered and read by experts, it did not quite match the quality of Kharazmi's translation of it :)
 Because the "translator" was not some dork who knew Greek. He was a master of its own, and translating was just a side activity for him.
 

Looks like I've mixed up some historical facts. But have I? Kharazmi's improvements on Ptolemy's work was not just in his Almagest, but Ptolemy's Geography book too. Also, I cannot find any source on the internet that says it was Kharazmi who translated Ptolemy's Almagest although it is rather clear in my mind that sometime in 1980s I had read a preface of the book stating that. So at this point I have doubts of different nature.
On one hand, rich Arabs are paying money to all the scholarly institutions in the world to remove the existence of Iranian works and scientists of centuries back and want even to change the Persian Gulf name into Arabian Gulf (as some of you American thief government official get the money and help them do so in news and universities alike), and instead I see all these Arab names having translated the Almagest into Arabic and none mentioning Kharazmi.
And on the other hand, American and Europeans, scholars or government agents alike, love to get money from Arabs to destroy anything Iranian in the history.
So it is a rather suspicious situation.
I even held the Almagest's first volume in my hand, sometimes in the 1980s, in the English language, reading its preface about how Kharazmi translated the original Greek into Arabic and created a work more accurate and better explained than Ptolemy himself. And there's no sign of that fact to be found on the internet today.
So at this point, I'm not sure I mixed a few historic facts up, or the rich Arabs' money has done its job well.
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