Translating Science

Sivin, Nathan.

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Volume 45, Number 1, Winter2002, pp. 131-140 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/pbm.2002.0016

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Essay Review

Translating Science*

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TRANSLATION AT THE SAME TIME ENABLES and hinders the exchange ofknowledge. How that happens is not easy to understand. Science, with its

ideal of perfect communication across cultural barriers, poses special perplex-ities that are the subject of these two very different books.They not only tellfascinating stories, but will be useful to scientists who are dissatisfied with plat-itudes.They are complementary in more ways than one.

Harried lecturers often rely on old history of science textbooks to add apinch of humanistic spice to meat-and-potatoes technical courses. Such sur-veys tell a simple and linear story.This is how it goes: the Greeks invented sci-ence, and theoretical physics, molecular biology, and the rest evolved from theirempirical and logical methods.There was one slight detour on this otherwiselinear path of development: Europeans happened to wipe out their classicalculture (and, for that matter, most of their literacy) over about four centuriesbeginning roughly AD 200. It took more than a thousand years to recover. Assophisticated intellectual life largely disappeared outside the church, the clas-sics materialized in the Islamic world—never mind why or how. Muslims pre-

*Scott L. Montgomery. Science in Translation: Movements of Knowledge through Cultures and Time.Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. xi + 325. $28; David Wright. Translating Science: The Trans-mission of Western Chemistry into Late Imperial China, 1840–1900. Sinica Leidensia 48. Leiden: Brill,2000. Pp. xxvi + 558. $100.

Professor of Chinese Culture and of the History of Science, University of Pennsylvania.Correspondence: 8125 Roanoke Street, Philadelphia, PA 19118-3949.Email: nsivin@sas.upenn.edu.

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, volume 45, number 1 (winter 2002):131–140© 2002 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Nathan Sivin

served them until Western Europeans were ready to let them back in andresume the real history of science and learning. In this way, the textbooks tellus, Islam served as a sort of Tonto (the half-savage but faithful sidekick) toEurope’s Lone Ranger.

Since it was “the Greek genius” that engendered the modern world,Africa,South Asia, and East Asia play no role in this drama.The textbooks ignore theirmany cultures.The older authors explain that none was capable of real science;the recent ones, who know better, allot them a few uninformative words inpassing. (James E. McClellan III and Harold Dorn’s Science and Technology inWorld History:An Introduction [1999] is an exception, attractive in many respectsbut rather thrown together and dependent on some very undependablesources as well as good ones; Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to Mankind [1998]is more judicious.)

The last couple of generations of specialist historians who study one tech-nical tradition or another, including scholars of Greek antiquity, have demol-ished this faith in an almost uninterrupted march of progress toward today’sperfection, but their more complex accounts have had little impact even onrecent textbooks.The problem of the textbook approach is not simple igno-rance. Everyone knows the names of Joseph Needham, A. I. Sabra, and othereminent scholars who have revealed the richness of non-European traditionsto a broad public, but not everyone goes so far as to read their work.The rootdifficulty is a disinclination to believe that people who are not like us (who-ever “us” is) can be just as clever and inventive as we are or (of course) ourancient surrogates the Greeks and Romans were. By now, given the culturaldiversity of first-rate scientists, mathematicians or chemists are seldom muddledenough to think of their own Indian or Korean colleagues as Tontos. But themainstream historians who write surveys in English remain predominantlyAnglo-American in standpoint. Most, in my experience, are still viscerallyuncomfortable about studying non-European peoples.

In the last two generations, studies of science and medicine in several civi-lizations have converged on a view very different from that of the textbooks:the Greeks had some powerful things to say about the possibilities of scientificthought and practice, but so did the Persians, Indians, Chinese, and other peo-ples. Ancient Greek habits of thought about nature, if examined unsentimen-tally, are no more modern than those of other technically minded ancients.

I would put it that the prime focus of science from AD 700 to 1200 lay inthe Islamic world, where traditions from all over Eurasia, including those of theancient and medieval Middle East, interacted. In Jundishapur, Baghdad,Cordoba, and other centers, Muslims, Christian heretics, Jews, and others drewon these traditions to generate new kinds of understanding.These had revolu-tionary effects after AD 1000, when people in Western Europe began learningand propagating the scientific innovations in new kinds of educational institu-tions and secular urban cultures. But the ferment of scholarship that supports

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this new view has had little influence even today on the quasi-industrial pro-duction of textbooks.

Science in Translation is not a textbook, but harried lecturers will find itmarkedly useful. It paints a sweeping but not at all vague picture of the tan-gled paths of scientific exchange across Eurasia from the time of the Greeks toour own era. It will engage any educated person. Scott Montgomery, a pro-fessional translator and generalist author, draws on historic and philologicalstudies in many languages, including Japanese. He tells two stories.The first ishow what Europeans think of as their early scientific heritage was constantlyretranslated, reorganized, reinterpreted, rewritten, and used in new ways overconsiderably more than a millennium as it passed from Byzantium through theMiddle East and then into other parts of what became the Islamic world.Thereit formed a synthesis influenced by many cultures. The second is about thecomplex response of the Japanese to foreign science from the 17th century on.I will give the gist of both arguments, emphasizing the points that I believe aremost important and original.

Not long after the time of Aristotle, Athens became a backwater. EminentRomans hired Greek teachers for their children but were more often inter-ested in the orators and poets, who provided a basis for eloquence and civicvirtue, than in the mathematicians and the philosophers of nature.The scien-tific writings they disregarded found refuge in Byzantium until the 5th cen-tury, when Zeno and Justinian drove out Nestorian and other heretic intellec-tuals and teachers.1 The Byzantines retained the scientific texts in Greek buthad no interest in extending their knowledge.

The refugees scattered eastward. One of the centers where many of themsettled down was Edessa (now in Turkey). It became a center of Christian cul-ture recorded in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic. Church leaders admired the pre-cision of the Greek language and encouraged its study.Translations of Galen’smedical writings, and modifications and adaptations of Ptolemy, soonappeared. Thus even before the lifetime of Mohammed (i.e., Muhammad),much of Greek learning already existed in “a Semitic language of wide usageand elegant literary and religious expression.” It was the Syriac translators whochose what later became the Islamic emphases on Aristotle, medicine, cosmol-ogy, and astronomy (p. 77).

Other refugees ended their trek in Jundishapur, which Persian kings in the3rd century AD had settled with Greek and Greek-speaking prisoners andrefugees to form “a nexus of Hellenism and cultural-linguistic mixing” well

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1Nestorius, a Syrian, when patriarch at Constantinople from 428 to 431, was famous as a fire-brand against heresies, and so may have helped to prepare the ground for the later persecutionof his own followers in the Eastern Church. Nestorianism was declared a heresy on the groundthat it believes in two complete bodies of God. It spread as far as India and China, and still flour-ishes in Turkey and Persia.

supported by royal patronage. Nestorian schools there drew on Indian as wellas Greek teachings.At that center too, scholars put ancient sources to new uses:“Pieces of various texts, phrases, words, titles, tables, calculations, and so forthmight all be combined and recombined to produce a needed manuscript. . . .These products were constantly being transferred, adapted to current uses, andsent on their way again” (pp. 79–81).

The rulers of the expansive new realms of Islam soon developed an inter-est in learning, especially in Baghdad in the 8th century. It is not surprising, inview of these precedents, that they supported translator-interpreter-advisorsfrom Nestorian Christian, Zoroastrian, Manichean, Syrian, and Persian, as wellas Arab, backgrounds. (Montgomery might well have added Sabians andCentral Asians to this list.) Within another century, the scholarly consultantswere adapting, as they translated into Arabic, Syriac versions of Greek texts inastronomy, medicine, natural history, and philosophy. A handful of specialistshave uncovered the great importance of Syriac culture in inspiring the efflo-rescence of Islamic scientific learning, but Montgomery is the first author toput this episode in a broad context for the large readership it deserves.

By the 10th century, translators increasingly chose “abstract, theoretical, andintellectually challenging sources.” In short, what finally reached Europe wasnot a preserved form of Greek knowledge, but—e.g., in astronomy—an Arabic-Greek-Persian-Indian alloy with traces of China and other cultures. Itsinternal boundaries had long since blurred or melted away. New instrumenta-tion, iconography, and mathematics were an integral part of the “Islamic wis-dom” that Europeans avidly translated.Textbooks used to say that the down-grading of rationalism that al-Ghazzalı championed in the 11th century wipedout Muslim science, but the new logic reshaped even religious studies, andnew technical initiatives continued long after. For instance, the work on celes-tial kinematics of al-Tusı in the 12th century laid the groundwork for someof Copernicus’ techniques.

Contacts between the Catholic south of France and Muslim Spain beganbefore 1000. When in the 12th century northern scholarship moved outsidethe monasteries and towns began founding schools and universities, it was inpart because translators worked furiously to overcome what they themselvescalled “the poverty of the Latins” (p. 146). Unlike the translators into Syriacand Arabic, who were masters of ancient learning, the Europeans who trans-formed Muslim scientific and medical books into Latin were discovering, asthey wandered, classics that they had never before seen. Because so few ancientbooks had survived in the Roman Catholic realms, most earlier scholars knewPlato only as a cosmologist and thought of Aristotle mainly as a logician.

The translators were after that cosmopolitan amalgam “Arab learning,” ofwhich Greek writings were only a part. Half of the books that large-scaletranslators such as Gerard of Cremona turned into Latin were by Muslim, not

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Greek, authors. Al-Khwarizmı’s algebra, ibn al-Haytham’s optics, becamemainstays.To understand the Arabic texts of Plato and Aristotle, the translatorsrelied on, and turned into Latin, the massive commentaries of ibn Rushd andibn Sina (whom they called Averroes and Avicenna).These tomes became theearly university textbooks. As Montgomery puts it, “Latin natural philosophy[i.e., science] between about 1100 and 1275 was largely a subset of the Arabictradition” (p. 175).

This foundation made it possible, by the late 13th century, for Europeans tolearn classical Greek and fetch texts from Byzantium.This was not a return tothe pristine original writings of Ptolemy and others. By 1250, no manuscriptssurvived from Hellenistic Greece. Rather, in each case, later scribes, editors,and commentators created “a textual institution, a collection of later versionsand commentaries of highly varied vintage” (p. 19).

Eventually Europeans wrote their own commentaries and digested ancientscience into handbooks designed to meet their needs.When we talk about thestudy of Ptolemaic astronomy in the universities, we mean new introductorytexts such as John of Holywood’s On the Sphere and various anonymous workscalled Theory of the Planets; only advanced students opened Ptolemy’s Almagestitself. As new books proliferated, the older Islamic versions became competi-tors, less suited to a contemporary readership than the boiled-down hand-books and the new philologically sophisticated translations. EventuallyEuropeans credited to the Greeks alone the knowledge that intrigued them. Itwas then that the myth of the direct descent of science from “the Greekgenius” became common.

Montgomery backs with massive recent scholarship his conclusion:

It was exactly this vast accumulation, with its nativized aspects in RenaissanceEurope, that made the Scientific Revolution possible.The mathematics ofEuclid, Ptolemy, and al-Kwarızmı [sic], including the sine function and use of the zero; the observatory, as an embodiment of the eye-as-discoverer, estab-lished by Regiomontanus on the basis of Arab models; the role of precision in measurement, by which observations and theories could be continuouslyrefined, even overthrown; and, finally . . . the attitude of scientific dissatisfac-tion by which the work of the past was there to be improved upon and chal-lenged, not merely revered—such were among the elements of “inheritance”from Arabic intellectual culture that provided the foundation for the thoughtof Copernicus,Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo. (p. 183)

Montgomery’s account of scientific translation in Japan begins with aperiod shortly after his first narrative ends. His main points are analogous: theevolution in that country from isolation to international science was “a historyof translation,” and complex historic accidents decisively affected the form andcontent of scientific discourse.

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The Japanese written traditions of science and medicine began c. 670 withstudy of Chinese technical classics. Although Europeans had long traded inJapan, from 1630 to 1720 the shogunate (i.e., the military dictatorship), mainlyin order to end the influence of Christianity, prohibited Western books in theoriginal languages. Some astronomical and other knowledge got through viaChinese versions of writings by Jesuit missionaries. When the authoritiesrelaxed the policy of exclusion, some Japanese physicians were able—politi-cally dangerous though it remained—to establish contact with Dutchmenwhom the government kept in quarantine but allowed to trade.These foreign-ers sold the Japanese inquirers a few technical books and instruments. By thelate 18th century, the language of innovative scholarship had changed fromChinese to Dutch. The European emphasis on utility encouraged people tostudy the novel scientific writings; they carried none of the “direct burdens ofmorality” with political implications that those in Chinese, always didactic, did(p. 213).

After the fall of the shogunate in the 1860s, the restored imperial regimewas all too aware of the military threat from the West. It undertook a crashcampaign to become a world power like the ones that threatened its inde-pendence, combining slogans of civilization and enlightenment with measuresto promote nationalism and emperor-worship. It moved research out of pri-vate hands into its own institutes.

Dutch ceased to be the main scientific language.The new government soughtup-to-date science wherever it flourished: in Germany for physics, geology,medicine, and basic university sciences; in France for mathematics and architec-ture; in Britain for mechanical and mining engineering; in the United States forcivil engineering and agriculture; and so on. By 1900, it was importing thou-sands of teachers and sending myriads of students abroad. It controlled transla-tion.After Germany undertook some anti-Japanese power plays and lost WorldWar I, Japan’s National Research Council began founding major journals inEnglish.The American occupation after 1945 tipped the balance decisively.

In Japan as at the western end of Eurasia, many cultures left traces in theimported science. Shizuki Tadao introduced Newtonian physics via a Dutchtranslation of a Latin version of John Keill’s English introduction to the LatinPrincipia. He wrote the first two volumes of his Rekisho shinsho (1798–1802) inclassical Chinese, although the final version appeared in Japanese. UdagawaYoan, the first to come to grips with Lavoisierian chemistry, based his transla-tion (1837–1847) on a Dutch version of a German translation of an Englishpopularization of Lavoisier’s Traité. Because after Napoleon’s invasion the Ger-mans rejected French influence, they ignored the terminology that was at theheart of Lavoisier’s revolution.Thus Udagawa remained unaware of it.To makematters even more complicated, he adapted many of his technical terms fromChinese. Montgomery makes it clear that in Japan as elsewhere one “mustuntangle political, literary, philosophical, and scientific developments, all

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within a larger linguistic context whose evolution reveals a profound shift inthe most basic of cultural loyalties” (p. 249).

Montgomery has made a persuasive case that, in the actual world, there canbe no universal language of science. Even mathematics,“the purest form of sci-entific logic,” is always “nested within written explanation and discussion” todefine its basic elements, changing its “expressive content” from one languageto another (pp. 254–55).

In addition to the historical accounts, Montgomery also discusses today’sscience, with noteworthy examples from various applied (but not basic) sci-ences. For example, he compares French and English writings on the sametopic in paleogeology to contrast the French tendency toward evocative, “lit-erary” diction,“more in league with the provisional conclusion than with theunassailable fact,” and the Anglophone preference for “outright declaration.”English writing is on the whole less willing to admit “its tentative nature,”although it is no less “rich in rhetorical moves, slips of logic, suggestive termi-nologies, broken transitions, calls upon the larger society, and . . . philosophicaland aesthetic manipulations” (pp. 263–67).Another example analyzes writingsin English on agricultural chemistry and geology published in India, with theirlocal terms and usages, their appeals to the special experience and knowledgeof an Indian audience, and their choice of words with local connotations thatstandard English would alter (pp. 258–62). Anyone who surfs widely on theInternet is likely to agree that it is creating a further profusion of local tech-nical dialects, another aspect of “the inevitable linguistic resistance to absolutestandardization” (pp. 262–63).

This will, I hope, give an impression of the book’s remarkable range.Although anyone familiar with the sources can quibble with details here andthere, doing so will not compromise the argument; this is a highly successfulbook. Any scientist who prefers historical actuality to the clichés that spokes-men use to impress the lay public can learn a great deal from it.

David Wright is a British historian of science, and Translating Science is basedon his very ambitious dissertation. Its scope is narrower than that ofMontgomery’s book, but it is equally illuminating, and its findings convergetoward the same conclusions about the ways in which culture shapes local lan-guages of science. Wright examines how, between roughly 1850 and 1920,indigenous and foreign authors collaborated to define in Chinese a terminol-ogy for the chemical elements. He explores in depth both primary sources andmodern scholarship in Chinese and Japanese, as well as in English.

The Chinese responded above all to chemistry because it was the leadingWestern science of the 19th century, because its economic value was obvious,and because some educators made it seem familiar by emphasizing its links tothe Chinese alchemy that students already knew about. Some intellectuals hadinformally studied European science since it became accessible early in the

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17th century, but it was not until about 1900 that the Manchu governmentand the Chinese elite, finally aware that science underlay the technology withwhich the imperialist powers threatened China’s survival, supported its inclu-sion in government and missionary schools.The early translators Li Shan-lan(1810–1882), Hsu Shou (1818–1884), and others, educated in the traditionalsciences, were convinced that the technical knowledge they were introducingwas compatible with their own culture.They created much of the terminol-ogy of modern science and engineering, generally as subordinates of Europeanemployees of the Chinese government or missionaries.

The best known of the officials was John Fryer (1839–1928), who foundedthe Translation Department of the government arsenal at Shanghai. By 1899 ithad published 126 titles in perhaps 30,000 copies. Despite his low status inEnglish society and his mediocre education (which led him to avoid writingson physics and astronomy, and often to translate so literally that novices couldnot follow his books), Fryer made an excellent career as a Chinese civil ser-vant. As a “secular missionary” for science, he founded a polytechnic instituteto attract the Shanghai public, and the first popular scientific journal (p. 100).The T’ung-wen Kuan, the government’s language school, which had better-qualified Westerners working on translations with less outstanding Chinese,was not nearly as productive as the Translation Department.

Despite their dependence on Chinese collaborators, the occidentals gener-ally made the decisions. Given their haphazard selection of books to translate,often those familiar from their school days, their Chinese publications tendedto be badly out of date. For instance, few chemical texts translated intoChinese before 1900 discussed chemical theories, and most still used Dalton’sformulas of a hundred years earlier.

The foreigners worked without coordination. Fryer and the Guangzhouphysician John Kerr translated the same chemistry text, creating different ter-minologies.That of Fryer became standard in later chemistry books, and thatof Kerr in medical books, remaining at odds for 25 years. By the time Fryerleft China for a professorship at Berkeley (1892), the initiative for translationhad moved into the hands of Chinese. As they looked increasingly to Japanafter 1895, the scientific influence of the European translators became decid-edly spotty.

Wright is acute and resourceful in evaluating the approaches to terminol-ogy, using the metaphor of natural selection to analyze the outcomes of com-petition. I would have been happy without the elaborate discussion of “logo-types” evolving via “struggle for use” through inheritance of “memes,”drawing on the Darwinian analogies of Richard Dawkins (p. 331), but somereaders will find all this suggestive.Wright concludes that the survival of a termis unpredictable, contingent on what rivals exist, on the reputation of its orig-inator, and on political decisions about other issues. Intellectual influence, hereminds us, works in peculiar ways. It turns out that the metaphysics, social

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prejudices, and even occult notions that British spokesmen for science injectedinto their writings made them more, not less, acceptable to the more old-fash-ioned Chinese. The political reformer K’ang Yu-wei (1858–1927) wrote ofether (i-t’ai) as a spiritual substance related to electricity; his radical discipleT’an Ssu-t’ung’s (1865–1898) dynamic philosophy equated ether with con-sciousness as well as with the agency of chemical and physical change. Fryer’senthusiastic accounts of English scientists who attempted through spiritualismto link science and consciousness encouraged T’an’s revolutionary ideals, builton ether as the agent of universal interconnectedness.

In the unrest that swept over China at the turn of the 20th century, its citi-zens rejected their dependence on translations and on foreign teachers, whommany of them found (because of their ties to the overt enemies of Chinese sov-ereignty) an “ambiguous, indeed distasteful scholarly model.” Odd thoughT’an’s philosophy of ether was, it and similar ideals supported the notion thatscience could yield not just weapons but “political and spiritual coherence”with which to overcome China’s turmoil and impotence (pp. 425, 427). By1919, the notion of modern science as the engine of progress had become cen-tral in Chinese politics.

This is an extraordinary history, revealing in its topic a complexity compa-rable with that portrayed in Science in Translation. Despite its substantial length,nearly twice that of Montgomery’s book for a more confined topic, its argu-ments are tight and well articulated.The chaotic state of the Chinese charac-ters printed in it suggests that the publisher, despite the high price, skimped oneditorial and production costs.

Wright’s book is rich in illustrative detail—for instance, close analyses ofrival terminologies.Those who want to understand the human dimension ofchemistry—for their own benefit or that of their students—will find it, alongwith Montgomery’s volume, invaluable.These two authors have done some ofthe hard work for the next generation of textbook writers. It will be interest-ing to see whether the latter can overcome the endemic parochialism and pro-duce the more adequate overview that we all need.

But readers, as they leave either book, will reflect on the large issue at theheart of both. Montgomery sums it up with precision when he evaluates “thedream of the unity of discourses, a vision of a universal lingua scientia able tobridge all differences, collect all efforts of intelligence, give order and directionto all uses of the human mind . . . [which] has sought its fulfillment in . . . nat-ural science.” If we can admit “that what we call ‘science,’ today and in the past,is predominantly a reality of language—knowledge generated, shared, and usedthrough media of written and spoken communication—then this dream mustbe relegated to the status of a dignified and useful hallucination.”There is “noscience without the varied discourses of literacy and orality that give it realityin the world of human understanding” (p. 271).

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References

McClellan, J. E., III, and H. Dorn. 1999. Science and technology in world history:An intro-duction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.

Porter, R. 1998. The greatest benefit to mankind:A medical history of humanity. New York:Norton.

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Barnacles

On water-splashed rockswait for food to wash past.

Hinged plateshermetically closedwhen exposed at low tideopen at wave splashes.

Miniature casting nets,feathery barbed legs,capture plankton,absorb oxygen.

Sated by the meal,the barnacle closesits protective plates.

THOMAS PETER BENNETT