--- title: "Word Translating Image. In Search of — Polański 2026" description: "The paper looks at how early Christian writers in Coptic and Syriac described church art and icons." authors: ["Tomasz Polański"] year: 2026 venue: "Folia Orientalia 55" source: "https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/6818" doi: "10.24425/for.2018.125150" licence: "CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Folia Orientalia)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/polanski-2026-word-translating-image-search-modern/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/polanski-2026-word-translating-image-search-modern/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2026/page/3/) / Word Translating Image. In Search of Modern-Language Equivalents for Syriac and Coptic Terminology # Word Translating Image. In Search of Modern-Language Equivalents for Syriac and Coptic Terminology **Authors:** [Tomasz Polański](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/tomasz-polanski/) · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** Folia Orientalia 55 · **Licence:** [CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Folia Orientalia)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.24425/for.2018.125150) · [PDF](https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/download/6818/5644) · [DOI 10.24425/for.2018.125150](https://doi.org/10.24425/for.2018.125150) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4388423602) **Citations:** 1 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) ## Summary The paper looks at how early Christian writers in Coptic and Syriac described church art and icons. It also asks how their specialised vocabulary should be rendered in modern languages, since earlier translators often guessed or smoothed over hard words. Polański reads two kinds of source closely. The first is Coptic hagiography, mainly the Martyrdom and Miracles of Saint Mercurius in Budge's edition. The second is a Syriac chronicle of the Qartamin monastery (Mor Gabriel), whose chapter on building and decorating the church survives with unusual completeness. He sets the original wording against the existing translations by Budge, Nau, Leroy, Dupont-Sommer and Goussen, corrects several renderings, and ends by compiling a glossary of Syriac art terms. The main finding concerns borrowing. Coptic art vocabulary relies heavily on Greek loanwords, while Syriac descriptions draw on native words and follow a tradition separate from Greek rhetorical ecphrasis. This matters because uncritical translations have spread misreadings into art-historical work, distorting how lost church interiors are imagined. ## Key points - **Coptic icon descriptions:** In the 7th miracle of St. Mercurius, a man named Gaipios commissions an icon using ten pounds of gold and real gems. It shows the saint spearing him. In the 8th miracle, Hermapollo offers a bier of pine and carved ivory, set with the saint's icon, three gold crosses and three silver sphrageis. - **Budge correction:** Budge translated the silver items as crosses. The Coptic actually names sphrageis, possibly medallions, which may match a Syriac term rendered by Nau as "sceaux". - **Syriac source:** The chronicle is British Museum Additional 17265, catalogued by Wright and translated by Nau in 1907. It was finished in 784/5, continued to about 818, and survives in a 13th-century copy. - **The church itself:** It was completed in 512 under Emperor Anastasius by the engineers Theodorus and Theodosius. - **Mosaic misreading:** The Syriac word for mosaic derives from Greek kybos (a cube, i.e. a tessera). Dupont-Sommer's reading "golden mosaics" is preferred to Goussen's "gilded coffers", which later authors still repeat. - **Loanword pattern:** Greek loans in these Syriac texts are rare, essentially only kybos and phanos (lamp). - **Dating note:** The PDF header gives Folia Orientalia LV (2018), not 2026. ## Interesting ideas - **Keep rival readings:** The author lists competing editorial readings side by side and states his own uncertainty rather than silently choosing one. One example is Nau's "in the east" versus Leroy's "above the altar", which hinge on a tiny difference in letters. — For Mova (learn): when witness parsers disagree, the disputed analyses and their sources could be stored as a recorded disagreement, not collapsed into one silver label. - **Real-world plausibility as tiebreaker:** The "gilded coffers" reading is rejected because it clashes with what is physically known about such buildings, while "golden mosaics" fits that evidence. — For Mova (world): the world model could rank competing word senses or attachments by whether the resulting scene is physically plausible. - **Tracing inherited errors:** The paper shows a mistranslation being repeated in good faith by later authors who never checked the original. — For Mova (learn): each training label could carry provenance, so an error from one teacher tier can be traced and removed from everything derived from it. - **Glossary with marked uncertainty:** The paper closes with a domain glossary in which shaky senses keep their question marks, e.g. "chancel (?)". — For Mova (world): lexicon and ontology entries could store a confidence or "obscure term" flag, so later reasoning knows which meanings are tentative. - **Checking translation against the source:** Budge's English quietly smoothed over obscure Coptic words, such as the uncertain description of the jewels and the sphrageis. Comparing the translation with the source exposed the loss. — For Mova (back): translation through the meta-world could compare its output graph with the source graph and flag content that was dropped or invented. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/) Topics: [Hebrew & Aramaic](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/hebrew-aramaic/) · [Semitic languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/semitic-languages/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{polanski2026word, title = {{Word Translating Image. In Search of Modern-Language Equivalents for Syriac and Coptic Terminology}}, author = {Polański, Tomasz}, booktitle = {Folia Orientalia 55}, year = {2026}, doi = {10.24425/for.2018.125150}, url = {https://doi.org/10.24425/for.2018.125150} } ``` - [← previous Word Alignment-Based Evaluation of Uniform Meaning Representations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zeman-2026-word-alignment-based-evaluation-uniform/) - [next → XQ-MEval: A Dataset with Cross-lingual Parallel Quality for Benchmarking Translation Metrics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/liu-2026-xq-meval-dataset-cross-lingual/) - [↑ back to papers of 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2026/page/3/) ## References 18 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Baumstark A., 1922, Geschichte der syrischen Literatur, Bonn (repr. 1968). 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