Theophrasti De Historia Plantarum (1483 Incunabulum)

...yet I would not say that the study of interpreting is to be so despised that you might never deign to approach it. There is utility even in that very thing, which a philosopher should not neglect. For it will benefit men no less when he has opened up the useful thought of another than when he has taught his own. Nor is that manner of speaking lacking, which should certainly be drawn from the workshop of philosophy, the teacher of all things, so to speak, when translating from a foreign language into your own. It indeed requires that you open up the same thing, but not what the common crowd is accustomed to preserve in translating, but what a philosopher, in his own judgment, would most appropriately give according to the proportion of either language. Likewise, it is certainly more excellent to express each thing ornately, but one should not indulge so much in the ornamentation of words that, if you can only translate something ornately by changing the meaning, you prefer elegance over the meaning, which is in a way the form of the speech. For a philosopher knows that the manner of words, as if it were a certain matter, should be taken according to the reason of that kind of form, not that form [should be taken] for the sake of the words. I also add the appropriate invention of naming things, which, since it is very often necessary in interpreting, requires philosophy, which, having perceived nature, renders new names, yes, but in so far as it pertains to the judgment of right reason, no less than the old. For names are imposed upon things as it pleased, and it is equally permissible to impose them daily. Nor can you conceive of any time in the future when either the invention of things or the imposition of names might cease. Yet this duty should not be attributed to the crowd, to whom everything indiscriminately pleases, but certainly to a philosopher, an investigator of reasons, so that neither the reason for the names is lacking, and they are placed as it pleased, even if it pleased by this reason rather than that. For which reason, we do not consider the study of interpreting, however much it may lack some ample gravity, to be spurned. But we preface that saying of Heraclitus that the immortal gods are here also, and from the other studies of philosophy to which we are devoted, we sometimes come to this. But it matters that we do this partly willingly, partly unwillingly. For when something must be translated from Latin literature into the Greek language, we translate it willingly; for we can accomplish more in our native language with less labor, whether or not this is inept is the judgment of others. But when it is necessary to interpret something of our own language to Latin men, with whom we now live, we by no means undertake this willingly. For we are foreigners among the Latins, no less in language than in fatherland, for I would never, by my own choice, have taken upon myself such an ample and difficult work to translate into the Latin language, nor would I have dared to approach any part of it. But I see most clearly that the same thing happens to me which Homer says is done spontaneously but with an unwilling mind. That which I would otherwise not have wanted, divine Nicholas, whom our age rightly boasts of having as supreme pontiff, makes me want. For he ordered me to open up the books of Theophrastus on plants in the Latin language. A matter vehemently arduous, not only for a Greek man, but also for a Latin one. For that kind of writing is far more copious, as everything in the Greek language holds, than in Latin, and the Latin authors lacked the care by which they might explain these things to their own people more fully and more sincerely, as Roman speech could. One may envy, when in other individual things, as well as in these which...