literary sciences

• الترجمة

Rooted in Aramaic targum, tarjama was used in the early history of Arabic both for interpretive explication and interlingual, primarily oral translation; early sources show the term’s meaning expanding to accommodate material practices, anticipating its consolidation as a standardized practice in Abbasid Baghdad. Focusing on Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq’s Risāla, this article reads tarjama as a patronage‑driven, materially constrained, and philologically self‑conscious practice. The Risāla inventories translated and untranslated works, names translators and patrons, records revisions and retranslations, evaluates competence, and links the quality of Arabic versions to the availability and condition of Greek exemplars. Translation appears here (1) as proprietary labor, commissioned, revised, and circulated as owned textual goods within courtly and professional medical contexts and (2) as iterative work of collation, correction, and verification. Unfolding against the backdrop of rigorous contemporary standards, such as those articulated by al-Jāḥiẓ, Ḥunayn’s practice frames tarjama as a term conceptualizing a critical, curatorial, interpretative, and self-evaluative practice requiring a specific translator profile. This practice, the article ultimately suggests is distinct from simple linguistic transfer, often associated with the term naql.