Iv - University of Salford Institutional Repository

elease Bayzantine prisoners in exchange of Bayzantine rare
manuscripts. 'Dar al-Hikmah', (The House of Wisdom), where rare
manuscripts and Arabic translations of Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and
Hippocrates, to mention but a few, were cherished for future
generations, was established in Baghdad. With the decline of the
Abbasid Caliphate, the translation movement shifted to Toledo in Spain
where it flourished by way of intermediate languages such as Arabic
and Syriac. A comparable college of translators was founded in Toledo
to translate Arabic works into Latin.
The most notable Arab translators of the time are 'Yuhanna ibn al-
Batriq' and 'Hunain ibn Ishaq'. The former reduced the original Greek
text into segments, regarding each segment as a structural and
semantic entity in its own right. Then, he would search for
corresponding segments in the target language to match the original.
Such literal translation, which stresses lexical equivalence, is often
inaccurate because (1) there are no Arabic lexical equivalents for all
words in the Greek lexis, hence some Greek words are left untranslated;
(2) no two languages are completely identical with respect to structure
or usage, hence the overuse of figurative language.
Hunain ibn Ishaq, on the other hand, viewed the text as An
indivisible whole. He did not venture to reduce it into isolated
structures. On the contrary, he would grasp the overall meaning of the
text before he transferred it into the target language without
jeopardizing the ease, naturalness, and grammatical unity of the target
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