Scientific activity is essentially an incessant dispute that aims to undermine established knowledge in favour of new knowledge, which proven and argued impose themselves to the detriment of the former. The accentuation of the dispute over knowledge took place to a greater extent with the emergence of the empirical sciences and their emancipation from the old scholastic knowledge rigidly controlled by the church, as Galilei, among others, demonstrates. He was one of the first to question the Ptolemaic system in favour of the Copernican system, and used his mother tongue, Italian, which offered him the possibility of expressing himself and arguing, more than Latin, which had until then been the unchallenged lingua franca of science. The translation into German of one of his most famous works, the Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (1632) more than 250 years later (1891), presents numerous challenges, related both to diachrony and thus to the use of a language that is in part now obsolete, and to the truth value of its contents, which are now in part superseded by new knowledge. The translator exploits the linguistic resources of German to make interpretations, clarifications and modernisations of somewhat dated content, demonstrating the importance of multilingualism in scientific communication.
