Translating in the Arab world

Abstract

This introduction to the Translator special issue Translating in the Arab World attempts to reframe some of the key debates in contemporary Translation Studies around the Arab(post-)colony and to suggest new ways of thinking about translation ethics, the position of the translator and the discursive and material situations and institutions that shape her practice, from the early twentieth century to the present. By focusing on the histories and political economies of translation practice in the Arab world, the articles in the issue propose new ways of thinking about the figure of the translator as a bodied agent with warring interests and desires, and about translation ethics as a contingent and deferred utopia.

Keywords:

• translator
• Arabic
• domestication
• foreignisation
• colony
• post-colony

Notes

1. The dispute started in 2007 and ended with a ruling by the Federal Court, Malaysia’s highest court, on 23 June 2014, upholding the ban on non-Muslims using the word ‘Allah’ to refer to God in printed material (see e.g. ‘Malaysia Allah Dispute: Top court rejects challenge’, BBC News Asia, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-27970565).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard Jacquemond

Richard Jacquemond graduated in Law and Sociology before studying Arabic both in France and in Egypt. He is currently Professor of Modern Arabic language and literature at Aix-Marseille University. He is the author of Conscience of the Nation. Writers, State and Society in Modern Egypt (Cairo: AUC Press, 2008) and has translated some 20 books from Arabic into French, most of them modern Egyptian fiction.

Samah Selim

Samah Selim is Associate Professor at the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures of Rutgers University. She is the author of The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985. Her current research focuses on translation and the early novel in Egypt. Selim is also an award-winning translator of Arabic literature into English.