Medical translation in the 21st century – challenges and trends

Abstract

Historically translation and medicine have gone hand in hand. A brief look at history reveals that medical translation has existed since the oldest forms of cuneiform writing on clay tablets in Ancient Mesopotamia. Archeologists have found a dictionary in Sumerian, Ugaritic, Akkadian and Hurrian dating from around 1300 BCE containing medical information in its pre-scientific form. Much later, in fifth century BCE Greece, we find the Corpus Hippocraticum, a body of texts that inspired further study and spread to other languages and cultures in subsequent centuries, such as in the work of Galen some 400 years later, whose work was translated into Arabic at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad in the ninth century CE. Between the ninth and the twelfth centuries, Arab translations were in turn translated into Latin, together with commentaries added by other Arab scholars (Montalt 2005). According to Savage-Smith (2001) medieval and early modern scholars in Europe drew upon Islamic traditions and translations as the foundation for their medical studies. Following Wallis & Wisnovski (2016) medieval textual cultures in general, and medicine in particular, can best be understood as products of dynamic processes of transmission, translation and transformation in which translators played a key role as active agents in reshaping and recontextualising knowledge and texts.