Croatian Makes First Translation of Koran

Adam S. Eterovich

www.croatians.com

The first translation of the Quran into a Western language was made into Latin. It was carried out by Hermanus Dalmata and Robertus Rotenesis in 1143, but was not published until 1543. According to the Oxford Dictionary, "translation" means expressing the sense of a word, sentence, or book in another language.

The first significant contribution to European science was made by Herman Dalmatinac (Hermanus Dalmata) in the 12th century. Dalmatinac was born in Istria, Croatia but worked in Spain and France. His philosophical-cosmological work “De essentiis” (1143) and translations of original philosophical and astronomical writings from the Arabic, as well as Greek authors preserved in the Arabic translation, put him among the outstanding scholars who set the European medieval sciences on a new course of development.

Many later English translations were based on a Latin version by Father Ludovic Maracci in 1698. Maracci was the confessor of Pope Innocent XI and was taught Arabic by a Turk.

One of the most famous English translations was by George Sale in 1734, who included a detailed explanatory discourse. Sale depended largely on Maracci's Latin version (he could not fully master the Arabic language). His tutor was an Italian (?) named Dadichi, the king's interpreter at the time. Although Voltaire asserted that Sale had spent "five and twenty years in Arabia where he had acquired a profound knowledge of the Arabic language and customs," this was ruled out in his biography by the historian R.A. Davenport as being "opposed by the stubborn evidence of dates and facts."

Undeniably Sale's translation of the Quran contains many faults, each one indicating that he could not have fully grasped the Arabic language. But despite its many inaccuracies,

Sale's version has gone through some thirty editions; it was retranslated into Dutch in 1742, German in 1764, French in 1750, Russian in 1792, Swedish in 1814, and into Bulgarian in 1902.

Those who have tried to translate the Quran from its Arabic original have found it impossible to express the same wealth of ideas with a limited number of words in the new language.