An-Najah Staff

Al-Jahiz is considered to be an outstanding Arab prose writer and scientist who wrote on a wide range of subjects and provided many insightful opinions. Among the important topics he dealt with was translation and translators. He talked about the translator in terms of his knowledge of the field concerned and his knowledge of the source language and the target language. Al-Jahiz pointed out that there is
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conflict between the source language and the target language. Each one of them tries to exert an influence on the other.
Al-Jahiz discussed how the type of science and the lack of translators who translated in the same field affect the translator's work; the more difficult the science is and the less translators who translated in it there are, the more mistakes the translator is likely to make and the more difficult it will be to translate the text.
This study tries to investigate Al-Jahiz`s opinion regarding the aforementioned matter and his argument about it which was based on translated texts from the Abbasid Era