ABSTRACT
Part II contains four rich and very different chapters, each of which illustrates in its own way how premodern actors’ terms relating to experience of the natural world were conveyed and transformed through translation. The terms “experience” and “translation” in the title to this Introduction are taken analytically, with translation understood here in the broad category of epistemic translation. This understanding of translation also embraces the sense of interlingual translation, where we often find an expectation that something significant is lost in translation, either intentionally or inevitably. Examples of such loss are found in this Part’s chapters, but was this always an assumption of our actors themselves? In this Introduction, I show that it was not the view of certain medieval Arabic-to-Hebrew translators, whose literal translations were often quite successful.
