by Isabella Vaj
Understanding a term is one thing, translating it is another. When confronted by the meticulous description of some particular object, especially when it is steeped in culture and history, often translators have considerable difficulty in finding the exact term for each component. This article deals with the detailed example of Egyptian Arab book binding in the Mamluk period (second half of the XIII – beginning of the XVI centuries) and the research conducted to identify Italian terms equivalent to those that exist in English.