I have translated a number of early martial arts treatises over the years, but the present text raises challenges beyond any of them. The linguistic layers are one major factor: this book is a translation of a translation, with all the complexity implied in such an undertaking. Monte's choice of Latin for the published version of his work is another factor. Medieval and Renaissance Latin was chiefly a language of scholarship, ill-suited to expressing the kinds of physical topics Monte explores. The problem is exacerbated by the language skills of the authors: Ayora is too good a Latinist, Monte too bad, to address these topics clearly. Ayora's elegant humanistic Latin would have earned his schoolmaster's approval, but it is problematic for the expression of technical subject matter: good technical writing calls for consistency of expression, something eschewed by polished Latin, which equates consistency with monotony, and favors variation in syntax and vocabulary. Monte on the other hand has a very rough command of Latin that sometimes makes it hard to tell what he is getting at. Nonetheless, patience and persistence have paid off, and after a decade of work on this text, there are few passages that I feel are more obscure to me than they would have been to Monte's contemporaries – this last point is rather important, especially considering that the Italian translation of the wrestling material in the Appraisal demonstrates that this was not an easy text for contemporaries to interpret.

This translation uses different approaches depending on the nature of the passage being translated. Where the meaning is clear, I have translated reasonably idiomatically, not trying to stay too close to the wording of the original, although I have retained enough of the flavor of Monte's language to provide some feel for how he expresses himself. Where the original is obscure, I have tried to reproduce that obscurity in a way that will allow readers to make their own interpretation – this is particularly true of Monte's descriptions of physical actions, which are often open to multiple readings.

One of the challenges with Monte's work is that the text is technical, but the language is not. Good technical writing calls for a one-to-one correspondence between word and meaning.