ترجمNot treated by Ibn Fāris as a triliteral root at all; ترجم is a quadriliteral formation … (root trjm)

The lexicographers in chronological order, from al-Khalīl to Lane.

Al-Jawharī already places تُرْجُمَان under the root ر-ج-م (Lane cites 'S in art. رجم'), implying the ت and ن were felt to be additions to a triliteral base even in the 4th/10th century. Ibn Manẓūr's Lisān preserves this analysis explicitly, quoting Ibn Jinnī's remark that the ت and ن in تُرْجُمَان are zāʾidatān ('augments'), and that the word instantiates the rare pattern فَعْلُلَان (as in عُتْرُفَان, دُحْمُسَان), a pattern Sībawayh himself did not record. Two senses are given: al-mufassir lil-lisān, 'one who explains speech' (in one's own tongue), and one who renders speech from one language into another; the verb تَرْجَمَ and تَرْجَمَ عَنْهُ are both attested. Lane, synthesizing, keeps both senses and adds that the same form (interpreter, interpret) recurs essentially unchanged in Aramaic and Geʿez, suggesting the lexicographers themselves sensed the word was not native Arabic coinage.

What the theorists of sound symbolism would say of these letters. Speculative by nature.

In al-Dabbāghī's letter-meanings, ت marks abundant, great good; ر marks all goods, outward and inward; ج marks either prophethood/sainthood or unceasing good (context-dependent); م marks all created beings. Read this way — speculatively — the word for 'interpreter' would sound, letter by letter, as 'good conveyed, wholly, toward (or by) the created being,' which resonates loosely with the interpreter's function of carrying a message across to others. Al-ʿAkbarī's celestial-sphere correspondences (ر = fifth heaven, ج = the starless Atlas sphere, م = the human being) add a cosmological register in which the human recipient (م) stands at the terminus of transmission through the higher spheres. This kind of letter-symbolism is not part of mainstream historical linguistics and should be treated as devotional/mystical reading only, especially given that the word itself may be a loan and its root-status is contested.

The two-letter nucleus (Ibn Fāris's own chapters) and the permutations of the letters (Ibn Jinnī).

Ibn Fāris's own ت-ر chapters never reach a fourth radical: ترز (hardness), ترس (shield), ترص (soundness/fitting), ترف (luxury), ترق (the collarbone, a lone item), ترك (leaving something alone), تره (a non-root offshoot), ترج (a place-name, and the citron), and ترح (grief) — none of these is ترجم, which simply falls outside his triliteral net. Set beside this, Ibn Jinnī's claim (preserved in the Lisān) that the true root is ر-ج-م with prefixed ت and suffixed ان invites a juxtaposition with رجم 'to stone, to cast (a conjecture)': the interpreter as one who 'casts' words across a linguistic gap. This is a suggestive parallel drawn from the sources given, not an established derivation, and Ibn Jinnī's greater-derivation method (al-taṣrīf al-akbar) is elsewhere applied to genuinely triliteral clusters, not confidently to a loan-pattern like فَعْلُلَان.

Cognates in the sister languages, and whether the word was borrowed.

Lane states plainly that the verb is 'essentially the same in Arabic, Chaldee [Aramaic], and Ethiopic [Geʿez]', pointing to a shared Semitic word rather than an Arabic-internal derivation. Syriac has turgĕmānā 'interpreter, translator', and the word is generally traced further back to Akkadian targumannu, an occupational term for an interpreter attested in cuneiform sources; from Aramaic it entered Hebrew (targum, used of Bible translation) as well as Arabic. The likeliest route for Arabic تَرْجُمَان/تَرْجَمَ is borrowing from Aramaic/Syriac, with the Akkadian form lying behind that in turn — this word is in fact the ultimate source of English 'dragoman' via later Romance/Ottoman transmission.

The word in Ibn ʿArabī's text and terminology.

In Faṣṣ Ādam, Ibn ʿArabī writes that divine reports (al-ikhbārāt al-ilāhiyya) come to us 'upon the tongues of the interpreters' (ʿalā alsinat al-tarājim ilaynā), immediately followed by 'He described Himself to us by us' (waṣafa nafsahu lanā binā). Here al-tarājim names the mediating agents — prophets, revealed speech, or more broadly the cosmos itself as self-disclosure — through which the Unseen is rendered intelligible in a form proportionate to the human recipient. The interpreter/translator thus becomes a technical image for the whole economy of tajallī: God speaking of Himself in a tongue (ours) He has Himself supplied, so that hearing Him we hear ourselves.