1 - 7 November 2001
Issue No.558
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 1 - 7 November 2001 Issue No.558 |
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Plain talk
Cairo has hosted yet another conference on translation, the third within two years, which is something of a record, and illustrates the importance which is attached to the enterprise.
The International Conference on "Translation, Techniques and Applications" was organised by the Higher Institute for Languages in cooperation with the 6th October University. It is amazing how each conference on translation always comes up with something new, contributing to the status of this venerable art/science.
This conference comes at a time when globalisation seems to be destined to dominate the world, and showed clearly that there is a great need to bridge the gap between East and West, between third and first world countries, a process in which translation remains a vital catalyst.
Recently I read that US intelligence authorities had confessed that the shortage in translators from Arabic to English slowed their investigations into the 11 September attacks. Apparently they had in their possession a number of recorded messages in Arabic which, incredibly, they could not decipher.
Presided over by Professor Salama Mohamed Solyman, dean of the Institute and Fawzia Shafik El-Sadr as secretary- general, the conference was attended by 500 delegates, including leading translators from the US, Spain, England, Algeria, Tunis, Syria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Iraq, Australia, Jordan, Germany and France.
Most papers were based on personal experiences, or on studies of translations of famous literary works. Hussein Hamouda discussed the different translations of Bocaccio's Decameron. Through different periods of history, Italian classical literary works were translated not directly from Italian but from a medial language, in this case English or French.
Nahed Abdullah discussed the role of translation in unravelling similarities and differences between Arabic and Chinese cultures. Her paper tackles where Chinese and Arabic languages intersect and where they might act in opposition. It also demonstrates methods of thinking through some applications presenting social customs, proverbs, wise sayings and traditional texts and their Chinese and Arabic cultural background.
Nahed Ali El-Tanay's paper deals with the translation of French surrealist poetry and the poetry of resistance into Arabic, with special emphasis on the Arabic translation of the French poet Elmer who belonged to the surrealist school.
Of the guest delegates Youssef Bakkar of Yarmouk University dealt with an interesting subject: a 50 year neglected translation of Rubaiyyat Al- Khayyam. This translation, directly from Persian, was published in Cairo in 1955 by Mohamed El-Husseini, an Afghani who had joined Al-Azhar University. This prose translation, Bakkar lauds, retains the ideas of the poem, something most other translations seem determined to discard.
Lotfy Debeesh of Tunis discussed the role of translation in classical Arab culture. Translation has helped enrich our heritage and enabled the Arabs to get in touch with Greek, Persian and Indian mentalities. Thus the Arabs were able to absorb the ideas of foreigners, a fact that undoubtedly contributed to later creativity, ingenuity and invention. Translation was strategic to the cultural exchanges between Arabs and "others."
Hoda Gelby, from Saudi Arabia, gave a paper entitled "Cross-cultural difficulties in Pierre Cachia's translation of Al-Hakim's Sign Al-Umr (the Prison of Life)." Gelby believes that there are sections in which the translation distorts the meaning completely. These incongruities emanate from difficulties that face Arabic- English bilinguals with translation pursuits and which come as a result of the translator's not realising the importance of the interpretive element.
Mustafa Maher, a pioneer in translating Arabic literature into German and vice-versa gives some basic principles of the translator's responsibilities and duties. The modern state, Maher argues, requires us to keep abreast of the times, which in turn demands that we encourage modernisation and cooperation with other countries. It is the translator's responsibility to modernise the language and catch up with the rest of the world. Quite a responsibility, one has to admit.
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