On Translation and Being Just: The Arabic Novel and the British Archive (original) (raw)
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The Empire writes back…Or does it? Translation Strategies and Power (Re)negotiation in Arabic Translations of Agatha Christie’s Murder in Mesopotamia., 2017
Carrying the title 'Queen of Crime', Agatha Christie remains one of the best-known and productive authors within detective fiction. She is often quoted for being one of the best-selling fiction authors of all times, competing with the Bible and Shakespeare by the number of translated and sold copies of her novels. As the wife of the archeologist Max Mallowan, she spent a great deal of time at archaeological excavation sites in present Syria and Iraq. Her encounter with this part of the world is portrayed in her autobiographical works. The time she spent in the Middle East also inspired her to pen some of her most famous novels, whose events take place here. One of them is ‘Murder in Mesopotamia’. The crime and its investigation in this novel take place in Iraq – a country, which was subject to British colonial ambitions and projects. The main research object of the thesis are three Arabic translations of ‘Murder in Mesopotamia’, published in respectively Egypt, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. Employing theories from the realm of Descriptive and Postcolonial Translation Studies, as well as Detective Fiction Theory, the analysis of the three texts examines the different translational strategies and choices, made by the translators. Among the main research emphases are the power dynamics in postcolonial sense, as well as the texts’ relation to nationality, race and foreignness. The final chapter outlines possible explanations of the proliferation of Arabic translations of Christies works, and her popularity amongst her Arab readers. Translated detective fiction in colonial and postcolonial context is a literary phenomenon, which remains largely unresearched. My hope with the present study is to provide some insights into the translational norms and decisions, governing the shaping of the translated literary texts, through which Arab readers enter Agatha Christie’s fictional world.
In a Better and Older Language: The Redemptive Potential of Arabic and Its Translated Fictions
La Corónica 43:1, 2014
A man in possession of a strange, esoteric and rare medieval manuscript written in an indecipherable old language is approached by a literature-loving friend who beseeches him to make the incredible text accessible by translating it and adding a suitable prologue. It was once a widely-read and -regarded text, but now, owing to social, religious and intellectual controversy, most of the copies have been destroyed -burned or sold for rag- but this hardly matters as so very few people would have been able to read it in its original language, anyway. The man gives in and labors away translating – or does he? The manuscript tells a story of books and death; and when you read it, you hardly know where its own contours end and where they begin to infiltrate the simulacrum of life that it refracts and sends up as much as it represents. Who, exactly, are the translator, the narrator, and the friend? Sword and lance, or paper and pen? The literary and the literal bleed. O, idle reader, you think you know where this is going, don’t you? You’re wrong.
Literature, Geography, Translation: Studies in World Writing , Alvstad, Helgesson, Watson (eds.), 2011
We suggest that translation offers an ideal "laboratory situation" for the study of cultural interaction, since a comparison of the original and the translated text will not only show the strategies employed by translators at certain moments, but will also reveal the different status of the two texts in their several literary systems. More broadly, it will expose the relationship between the two cultural systems in which those texts are embedded. (Bassnett 2007, 19) An early twentieth-century Arabic literary text translated into various European languages at different points of time is an ideal object for the type of investigation Susan Bassnett describes. Such a text is entangled with the interactions between the "Orient" and the "West" during both colonial and postcolonial periods, thus representing a case of "cultural translation" informed by unequal and shifting power relationships between source and target cultures. This essay compares the translations of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn's al-Ayyām (The Days 1) (1926/1929) into English (1932), French (1947), Swedish (1956), Norwegian (1973), and, finally, into a new English edition (1981), 2 and focuses on how the presentation of the work targets European readers through paratextual means including covers, titles, prefaces, postscripts and notes. Because of target readers' unfamiliarity with the socio-cultural milieu described in the book, mediation "across gaps of cultural knowledge" (Tymozcko 2007, 230) is warranted, and these translations exploit paratextual resources to explain the "unknown". As is apparent from the paratexts, however, these representations of the unfamiliar are informed by the cultural and ideological values of their target societies, and, as I shall show, they reflect the shifting assumptions and stances of translators, editors, and publishers inhabiting different spatio-temporal contexts. As Urpo Kovala argues,
A Text on Trial: The Translation and Adaptation of Adel Hakim's Exécuteur 14
Social Semiotics, 2007
This paper deals with the problem of translation for the stage, of translation–adaptation and its subsequent production. It evidences the complexity of this type of practice, given the complex interplay of signs involved not only in translating the text for the stage, but also at the level of performance. The implications for translation theory and practice are discussed through discussion of the translation and performance of a text that is politically engaged, Adel Hakim's Exécuteur 14. This paper also problematizes the relation among different languages within the same text, the role of foreign terms, of syntax, and rhythm in the construction of discourse, and implications for translation. In particular the focus is on the problem of the relation between intertextuality, translation, performance, communication, and value systems.
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2003
This book, replete with invaluable tips on how to translate Arabic into English, is a practical work intended to produce competent Arabic translators (both Arabs and non-Arabs) for whom there is presently a considerable need. It is based on a course taught by James Dickins at the University of Durham, which, in turn, was modelled on a course in French-English translation by his co-authors (Thinking translation: a course in translation method: French to English, London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Showing just how differently an Arabic text can be rendered into English, chapter 1 presents three well-known translations of a su : ra from the Quran. For the Arabic walam yakun lahu kufa'an 'ahad, we note a (1909) translation by Rodwell: 'And there is none like unto Him', the very close (1997) Al-Hilali and Khan: 'And there is none co-equal or comparable unto Him', vs. the radically different (1997) Turner version: 'And there is nothing in the whole of the cosmos that can be likened to Him' (pp. 11-12). Indeed, quranic translation, according to most Muslim scholars, is much more of an interpretive enterprise, since they believe that the Quran, in fact, defies translation (witness the fact that Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall's subtitled 'explanatory translation' of the Quran is, in fact, entitled The meaning of the glorious Quran (New York: Mentor Books, 1953)). The authors, however, are perfectly justified in calling Quran translation an exercise in 'exegetic translation' (p. 11). Chapter 2 (pp. 15-28) discusses literal and idiomatic translations, among other interesting topics. The colloquial Arabic expression 'illi fa : t ma : t 'what has passed has died' (lit.) is much better rendered by 'let bygones be bygones' (p. 17) or 'what's done is done' (p. 35). As the authors explain: 'Here the grammar is completely different and the metaphor of "'dying'' is lost' (p. 17). Another good example cited is the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) proverb yawm laka wa yawm 'alayka, lit., 'a day for you and a day on you', elegantly translated as 'you win some, you lose some' (ibid.). One of the strengths of this work is the solid emphasis placed on communicative translation (pp. 17, 18, 29, 35, 42, 49, 254). By way of illustration, let me explain that one of the most typical characteristics of Arabic is the use of religious formulae in everyday speech. Thus, expressions such as 'in sa : ('a) 'alla : h 'if God wills' occur literally dozens of times daily, if not more, in the speech of millions of native speakers throughout the Arab world. Rather than translate this as 'if Allah wills' or 'God willing', or something to this effect, I concur with the authors' assertion that this may most often be rendered by 'I hope' (p. 35). Of course, the religious nuance is lost, but that is quite understandable across cultures, and quite acceptable. One of the most difficult aspects of translation, in my opinion, has to do with collocational meanings and the ranges of specific lexemes. One must therefore have a firm grasp of both of these topics to function as a proficient translator. As the authors correctly observe, although waTı : q usually means 502 'firm', in atta"a : wunu lwaTı : q, it is to be translated 'close co-operation'. Also, 'commercial acumen' is the correct rendering for 'commercial intelligence' (MSA aððaka : 'u ttija : rı :) and ibtisa : ma mus 1t 1an"a is literally 'an artificial smile', much better translated as 'a forced smile' (p. 71). The work abounds in this type of useful commentary. Turning to the fascinating area of irreversible binomials (pp. 71-2), English has a set word order in binomial expressions such as 'pots and pans', but not the reverse. One of the best-known examples from Arabic of this phenomenon is 'black and white', which reverses these colour adjectives, viz., 'abyad 1u wa 'aswad (cf. Italian bianco e nero). The following examples show just how pervasive this type of construction is in Arabic when contrasted with English: min damihi wa lah 1mini, which is translated quite appropriately as 'his own flesh and blood' (p. 71), as well as the common: laylan wa naha : ran 'night and day'; almawtu walh 1aya : t 'life and death'; and almuðnibu walbarı : " 'the innocent and the guilty'. Let me close with a reaction to the authors' treatment of dialectology and diglossia (pp. 166-8). Firstly, I certainly agree with the assertion that MSA is not the native tongue of any speaker, but do not concur that there are five stylistic registers in MSA ranging from acroletic on down, and three levels in the colloquial dialects. Rather, the situation is that of a huge MSA continuum, for which the reader may examine my essays 'Formal vs. informal in Arabic: diglossia, triglossia, tetraglossia, etc., polyglossia-multiglossia viewed as a continuum', in
No translation would be possible if its ultimate essence strove for likeness to the original. —Walter Benjamin Imagining is first and foremost restructuring semantic fields. —Paul Ricoeur ABSTRACT Despite the increasing interest in translation in the last two decades, there has been no investigation of the translation of historiography and its transformation from one language to another. This article takes as a case study the translation into French of Ibn Khaldûn, the fourteenth-century North African historian. It considers specifically the translation done by William de Slane in the context of the colonization of Algeria. The Histoire des Berbères, the French narrative of Ibn Khaldûn that relates to the history of Arabs and Berbers in the Maghreb, has become since then the source of French knowledge of North Africa. It is upon that French narrative that colonial and post-colonial historians have constructed their knowledge of North Africa, of Arabs, and of Berbers. The article shows how a portion of the writing of Ibn Khaldûn was translated and transformed in the process in such a way as to become a French narrative with colonial categories specific to the nineteenth century. Using a semiotic approach and analyzing both the French text and its original, the article shows how colonialism introduced what Castoriadis calls an " imaginary " by transforming local knowledge and converting it into colonial knowledge. In showing this the essay reveals that not only is translation not the transmission of a message from one language to another, it is indeed the production of a new text. For translation is itself the product of an imaginary, a creation—in Ricoeur's words, a " restructuring of semantic fields. " I. TRANSLATION AND THE IMAGINARY Translation was a part of the whole enterprise that the early colonial administration in Algeria set in place, an enterprise that made knowledge indispensable for colonization. In order to know the natives, one had not only to observe them, study them, and understand their culture and their society, but also to know their past. The present was believed to be " out there, " to be apprehended by observation ; the past was assumed to be recorded in documents, to be grasped only by a work of translation, either direct or indirect. The officers of the Arab Bureau, the military institution that assured both the production of knowledge and the establishment of order, were mainly ethnogra-phers, with little concern for history. 1 The later interest in history among the scholars of the civilian regime was an attempt to go beyond the Arab Bureau's
Court translation and interpreting in times of the ‘War on Terror’: The case of Taysir
2016
Abstract: The case of Taysir Alony, the Al-Jazeera reporter who was imprisoned because of alleged collaboration with a terrorist organisation, raises several questions about the situation of police and court translation and interpreting in Spain. Alony and his co-defendants ’ indictments were based, at least partially, on tapped conversations which were translated literally by verbatim translators or translators who did not belong to the same speech community as the speakers. Moreover, parts of the translated conversations and documents were framed in a manner that created a climate conducive to conviction. Given the context of the ‘War on Terror ’ in which the translations and the ‘evidence ’ were interpreted, this case raises questions such as interpretation vs. interpreting, the translation of culture and the role of the translator/interpreter. This paper scrutinises these questions taking into consideration the historical, political and ideological context of the case. Using som...