ABSTRACT

In the field of medieval Arabic medicine, an abundance of extant medical translations allows people to document how translators attempted to appeal to their audience and how they took the immediate practical needs of their readers into account. This chapter presents samples from this material and illustrates the insights it can provide into the relationship between the translator and his audience. The medical translations into Syriac and Arabic, which form the backdrop of the following discussion, were part of the so-called Graeco-Arabic translation movement. The bulk of Arabic medical translations was undertaken in ninth-century Baghdad. They are chiefly associated with Hunayn ibn Ishaq and the other members of his translation "workshop". Hunayn and other medical translators served an audience that consisted mainly of physicians, whose market value was in part determined by their familiarity with ancient Greek medicine, particularly the works of Hippocrates and Galen.