The School of Toledo

In 1085, Toledo, Spain was taken from the Muslims by Alfonso VI of Leon. It soon became the capital of Castile and a community of scholars. There, the transmission of ancient knowledge reached its peak through the School of Toledo where translations were made from Arabic to Latin and later to Spanish, and helped the scientific and technological development in the years of the European Renaissance. Toledo took the place of Baghdad as the new great translation center of the world. Under the leadership of French Archbishop Raymond, who reigned from 1126 until his death in 1152, the Toledo School's Bureau of Translation attracted first rate scholars from all over Europe. Raymond knew the wealth of knowledge and scientific expertise, which the Muslim world possessed, and desired that Christendom gain access to its riches. Archdeacon Dominic Gundisalvi undertook many translations and directed the Bureau of Translation that Raymond had founded. Among the school's great scholars were Gherard of Cremona, John of Seville, Adelard of Bath, Robert of Chester, Rudolf of Bruges, Hermann of Carinthia, and Michael Scot. The twelfth century came to be known as the Age of Translation.

By the middle of the thirteenth century, scholars such as these had translated the bulk of ancient science into Latin, including the writings of such greats as Aristotle, Ptolemy, Euclid and Hippocrates, which had been preserved in Arabic for hundreds of years. These writings were Arabic manuscripts still held today in the Vatican Library in Rome.

Etienne Dolet (1509-1546), a French humanist was tried for translating one of Plato's "Dialogues" in such a way as to imply disbelief in immortality. Dolet did in fact add three extra words to a text he was translating from Greek, one of his biographers defends their use as adding to the clarity. He was condemned as an atheist, tortured and strangled at the age of thirty-seven and his body was burned with copies of his books at his feet.

The second translator to die for his transgressions was Bible translator and reformer William Tyndale (1494-1536), who was so impressed by Luther's teachings that he created an English version of both the Christian texts and the Torah, which were then smuggled into England.

Tyndale was forced to flee England but was eventually arrested in Belgium in 1535, then strangled and burned at the stake after a year and a half of imprisonment. As a translator, Tyndale crafted many everyday phrases, including: "Let there be light", "Eat, drink and be merry", "The powers that be", "Ye of little faith", "Ami my brother's keeper", "A man after his own heart", and "Signs of the times". His translation of the Bible is credited with influencing the later "King James" version.

The last of the three 'translator-warriors' was the charismatic and successful Martin Luther (1483-1546). In 1540, Luther wrote the self-promoting and nationalistic Sendbrielvom Dolmetschen, in which he criticized Latin, Hebrew and other languages for being full of "stones and stumps", in contrast to his 'smooth' German writing. As a poet, writer and translator, Luther 'reformed' the German language in ways that can still be felt today. He is often considered the "father of the modern German language." Still, Luther was constantly forced to defend his principles of meaning-oriented translation and he was eventually put under the ban of the Empire. Fearing for his safety, his own friends once even kidnapped him to protect him.

Until the passage of these ten pivotal years, translators in the West had been viewed far more readily as heroes than as villains. They had opened all the ancient arts and sciences to the world around them, not only philosophy, astronomy, and geometry but the more advanced range of Arab mathematics, not to mention medicine, optics, and other sciences. They had even opened the door to the enormously popular studies of alchemy, and astrology. As Giordano Bruno himself would say: "From translation all science had its off-spring." After 1546, public attitude began to change and translators were no longer viewed as heroes. Increasing emphasis would be placed on the inadequacy of translators and even the translation process itself, a view which has largely prevailed until the present day.