Anyone who wants to approach to medieval Greco-Arabic translations has to face with the problem of the relationship between the original Greek text and the Arabic translation.
The Arabic translators at times changed the order of the part of the Greek original. An example is the Arabic translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: in the Arabic version, the first two books appear in reverse order with respect to the Greek. Alpha elatton – i. e. one of the two introductory books of the Metaphysics as it has come down to us – antecedes Alpha Meizon, the well-known beginning of Aristotle’s work. This is the case also for the Arabic translation of Plotinus’ Enneads, which has come down to us in the so-called –Theology of Aristotle.
G2A Web Application for computational philology (g2a.ilc.cnr.it) is a Research Infrastructure for managing translations of texts. It has been designed and developed, under the guidance of Andrea Bozzi, by Simone Marchi and the team of the ILC following an innovative method based on computational philology and computational linguistics applied to historical philosophical text in order to make it easier the comparison between the original works and their ancient translations.
At present, G2A contains a collection of four texts, that cover the whole of Plotinus’ texts translated into Arabic, namely the Ps-Theology the Greek Sage (al-Shaykh al Yunani), and the Epistle on the Divine science (Risala fi-l-‘ilm al-ilahi) attributed to al-Farabi. The system also includes a portion of Aristotle Metaphysics. For each work of the collection, the users can found the data concerning the bibliographical references, the manuscript tradition, as well as a description of the structure and composition of the Arabic translation and a searchable bibliography of some 200 titles.
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