How Two English-language Translators of Galileo Permanently Changed His Words
In Italian, there is an expression “traduttore traditore”, which means in English, “A translator is a traitor.” The expression arises from the fact that there is rarely an exact correspondence of meanings of words as one passes from one language to another, so there is almost always a slight change of meaning. But there are situations where translators literally leave out passages, or, as we see below, add passages, completely changing the meaning of the original text.
The text in question is the introduction to the third day of the Discourses on Two New Sciences (Discorsi e Dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due Nuove Scienze), Galileo’s last work, with his most important results, first published in Leiden in 1638 by Lodewijk Elzevir. Here is the 1914 translation into English by Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio [emphasis mine]:
My purpose is to set forth a very new science dealing with a very ancient subject. There is, in nature, perhaps nothing older than motion, concerning which the books written by philosophers are neither few nor small; nevertheless I have discovered by experiment some properties of it which are worth knowing and which have not hitherto been observed or demonstrated. Some superficial observations have been made, as, for instance, that the free motion of a heavy falling body is continuously accelerated; but to just what extent this acceleration occurs has not yet been announced; for so far as I know, no one has yet pointed out that the distances traversed, during equal intervals of time, by a body falling from rest, stand to one another in the same ratio as the old numbers beginning from unity.
It has been observed that missiles and projectiles describe a curved path of some sort; however, no one has pointed out the fact that this path is a parabola. But this and other facts, not few in number or less worth knowing, I have succeeded in proving; and what I consider more important, there have been opened up to this vast and most excellent science, of which my work is merely the beginning, ways and means by which other minds more acute than mine will explore its remotest corners.1
Here is the corresponding original paragraph in Latin [emphasis mine]:
De subiecto vetustissimo novissimam promovemus scientiam. Motu nil forte antiquius in natura, et circa eum volumina nec pauca nec parva a philosophis conscripta reperiuntur; symptomatum tamen, quae complura et scitu digna insunt in eo, adhuc inobservata, necdum indemonstrata, comperio. Leviora quaedam adnotantur, ut, gratia exempli, naturalem motum gravium descendentium continue accelerari; verum, iuxta quam proportionem eius fiat acceleratio, proditum hucusque non est: nullus enim, quod sciam, demonstravit, spatia a mobili descendente ex quiete peracta in temporibus aequalibus, eam inter se retinere rationem, quam habent numeri impares ab unitate consequentes. Observatum est, missilia, seu proiecta, lineam qualitercunque curvam designare; veruntamen, eam esse parabolam, nemo prodidit. Haec ita esse, et alia non pauca nec minus scitu digna, a me demonstrabuntur, et, quod pluris faciendum censeo, aditus et accessus ad amplissimam praestantissimamque scientiam, cuius hi nostri labores erunt clementa, recludetur, in qua ingenia meo perspicaciora abditiores recessus penetrabunt.2
In the English-language translation, in the highlighted sentence, we read “I have discovered by experiment.” But in the original, nowhere does the word “experimentum”, Latin for “experiment”, appear. It was simply inserted by the translators.
According to Alexandre Koyré,3 who always considered Galileo to have been a Platonist, by translating “comperio” (“I find”) into “I have discovered by experiment”, the translators, visibly partisans of empiricist epistemology, could not imagine that anything could be proven or discovered except by experiment. In so doing, they tied Galileo to the empiricist tradition and thus irretrievably misrepresented his thought. Unfortunately, this translation is what almost all English-speakers will read.
I shall return to Koyré’s assessment of Galileo as a Platonist in a future post.
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Galileo Galilei, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences. Translated by Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio. Prometheus Books, 1991, pp.153-154.
Galileo Galilei, Discorsi e Dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due Nuove Scienze, Opere VIII:190, Firenze: Barbera, 1898, p.190.
Alexandre Koyré, Traduttore-traditore: A propósito de Copérnico y Galileo, In Estudios de historia del pensamiento científico. Siglo veintiuno editores, 1977, pp.258-260. Translated from the French.