[Tloewald]

One quibble — the author credits Boethius with having attempted to translate the works of Aristotle, but having died before he could complete the project. But he did finish the stuff on logic. The author refers to this as "luck" but shouldn't we give a little credit to a Dark Ages philosopher who chose to make his life's work the translation of Aristotle? Starting with logic was almost certainly not luck.

[rwl]

Indeed, it wasn't. In fact, Aristotle's logical works (the "organon") have been recommended as the entry point into his philosophy since antiquity. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organon

[JoeAltmaier]

Curious - why a 'life's work'? Wouldn't it have taken a few months?

[huxley]

Note: IANA medieval scholar nor particularly versed in medieval translation, but here would be my explanation:

A medieval translator tackling Aristotle would face several challenges, some insurmountable, but Boethius had many unique advantages.

Boethius was one of the most powerful bureaucrats in the Latin Empire (the "magister officiorum"), so he had the influence and access to manuscripts that few others could match. He was classically trained in his youth and could speak, read and write in both classical Greek and Latin, a skill that was becoming rare among his contemporaries, a good thing for him but also a problem since there weren't many colleagues he could confer with.

If a word or phrase was unfamiliar --and in a technical work like Aristotle's there could be plenty of vocabulary that wasn't common-- Boethius would need to research and document it. That wasn't as simple as it would be today, there were no real dictionaries or reference books to assist in translation. So he would have to access other manuscripts, which might involve a painstaking copying process by hand, travel over large distances, and other numerous challenges the modern translator rarely needs to face. Fortunately Boethius had the power, influence and wealth to do this.

Making things even more difficult is that the Aristotelian corpus was fragmentary even in Boethius' time, much of what survives from Aristotle aren't anything close to completed manuscripts but more like class notes, compiled and edited by students and later scholars. This meant that Boethius wasn't able to do just a word-for-word translation or a paraphrase, he needed to analyze and comment on each section so that nuances weren't lost. Without a large body of existing scholarship, Boethius had to do a lot of the work on his own.

Given that translation wasn't his day job, each document could take years or even decades of work.