Ideas from the CBC: The Translation Movement

Between the 8th and 10th centuries, Baghdad was the center of a well-funded and systematic effort to translate large amounts of secular Greek texts into Arabic. The translators were multi-ethnic, multi-faith, and multilingual. The scholars and translators of the Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement often added their own thoughts and ideas to the texts they were translating, seeing them as resources to be engaged with rather than merely texts to be literally translated. The Arabic was eventually translated into Latin bringing to Europe the works of Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen.