Lecture Series, Workshops and Publications
Lecture Series
In December 2009, that has hosted dozens of distinguished figures in the field of translation.
A year-long informal lecture series that is hosted by participating departments at AUC across the schools in order to raise awareness among the students and faculty about the importance of translation and translation studies at AUC. The series is also meant to showcase the already existing expertise and scholarship among the faculty and students in the field. The lecture series includes speakers from ECL, ARIC, CMRS, ECS, PVA, SAPE, SCE, JRMC, and TAFL, among others.
These events and partnerships have been extremely valuable for AUC and national institutions alike. They continue to be very well attended and have drawn audiences from academia, cultural centers, the professional world of translation, as well as AUC and national university students including international AUC students.
Publications
December 2019 marks a decade in the life of the Center for Translation at AUC. In celebration, CTS published an anthology of a select number of lectures delivered at the center over the past ten years. The anthology is entitled In the Shoes of the Other: Interdisciplinary Essays in Translation Studies from Cairo edited by Samia Mehrez, Professor of Arabic Literature in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations and Director of the Center for Translation Studies.
Interdisciplinary Essays in Translation Studies from Cairo
Edited by Samia Mehrez
Cairo: Al Kotob Khan, 2019
December 2019 marks a decade in the life of the Center for Translation at AUC. In celebration, CTS published an anthology of a select number of lectures delivered at the center over the past ten years. The anthology is entitled In the Shoes of the Other: Interdisciplinary Essays in Translation Studies from Cairo edited by Samia Mehrez, Professor of Arabic Literature in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations and Director of the Center for Translation Studies.
In the Shoes of the Other brings together some of the most engaging research and testimonies by leading scholars, practitioners, activists, and artists from across the humanities and social sciences, focusing primarily on the Arab world. The anthology is divided into six parts:
Part I, “The Translator: Memories, Testimonies, and Reflections,” includes testimonies and reflections by major translators from Arabic into English but also French and Italian into Arabic. Part II, “Translation, Migration, and Identity,” includes essays that dwell primarily on the relationship between translation, power, and identity in a globalized world.
Part III, “Literary Translation: Challenges and Opportunities,” focuses on the shifting pressures on Arabic literature through a wide variety of literary traditions and texts.
Part IV, “On Carrying Across Languages, Cultures, and Registers,” engages multiple strategies and challenges of carrying across—from one culture to another—various linguistic idioms, registers, and metaphors, and how these travel between different languages (Arabic, English, French, Turkish, German) both synchronically and diachronically, and within different contexts of power.
Part V, “Translation Across Disciplines,” includes essays that explore the political and cultural impact and value of a wide range of disciplinary translations that reassess the place and stature, within Arab culture and at a global level, of entire fields of knowledge.
Part VI, “The Stage, the Screen, and the Languages In-between,” includes hands-on essays by scholars and practitioners of translation in the visual and performative fields of theatre, cinema, and dubbing and subtitling.
In May 2011, an AUC graduate student symposium that culminated in the publication of a volume of essays by this group of graduate students, edited by the director of CTS entitled Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir (AUC Press, 2012).
Translating Egypt’s Revolution
Translating Egypt’s Revolution was praised by leading Translation Studies scholar, Michael Cronin, in the following terms:
“A strikingly original and fascinating account of the way in which translation is core to an understanding of how events have transformed Egypt. In redefining conventional understandings of translation and equivalence, making visible the practice of the translator, and conceptualizing translation as an act of rewriting, this volume of essays is a unique contribution to our understanding of how translation shapes the contemporary world.”
Translating Egypt’s Revolution has been very favorably reviewed in the following journals, literary supplements, and blogs:
Collaborative Initiatives
In May 2010, co-sponsored with the Women and Memory Forum and the Cynthia Nelson Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies at AUC.
It was launched in October 2011 as a collaborative initiative between the Center for Translation Studies and the National Center for Translation of the Ministry of Culture in Egypt. The House of Translation is a translator-in-residence program that fosters and promotes innovative translation projects linking various cultural achievements and legacies.
There are three cycles of lectures and workshops each year at The House of Translation, with each cycle focusing on one theme or subfield in Translation Studies, followed by a practical workshop. The workshops have attracted more than two hundred applicants, sixty of whom have been selected to attend (twenty applicants per workshop). These applicants represent a wide spectrum of participants interested in the field of Translation Studies, such as Professional translators, Teaching faculty in national universities, Graduate students from national universities, and Graduate students from AUC.
The first cycle at The House of Translation: included two public lectures and a practical workshop and was held in February 2011, focusing on Translation Studies and Theory. The Inaugural lectures were delivered by Professor Michael Cronin, Senior Lecturer in the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies and Dean of the Joint Faculty of Humanities at Dublin City University.
The second cycle of lectures and workshops: took place during the second half of June 2012 and was conducted by senior, award-winning UN translator, Mr. Mohamed El Kholy. The focus during this second cycle was Arabic and International Organizations.
The Third cycle of lectures and workshops: took place during December 2012 and is focused on Translation and New Media.
In (September 2012) AUC partnered with the Transregional Studies Forum in Berlin and its program Europe in the Middle East-the Middle East in Europe. The Summer Academy is designed to support doctoral and postdoctoral researchers and scholarly networks and contribute to closer ties among research activities in and outside Europe and the Middle East. It is also meant to foster interdisciplinary research fields that benefit from the sort of intercultural cooperation this forum provides.
Workshops
Translation Theory Workshop by Professor Michael Cronin, February 2012
The aim of the workshop:
- To make translators more aware of what they do; the process of thinking of translation.
- To show how key moments in history affect the course of translation.
• Globalization is not possible without translation.
• Translators transform society and culture. Fields like philosophy, literature, history and political science wouldn’t have been available to us if it weren’t for translation.
Polysystems Theory
Different conventions in writing. For example, literature is a poly system since it includes, sci-fi, romance, crime, children’s stories and so on.
Polysystem theorists argue that at a certain point in time, translation became the dominant poly system because of:
- Language contact
- Cultural and political fascination
- War and diplomacy
- Renaissance: To rediscover through translation and hence transform culture
- Crisis: when language feels endangered and needs to resist excessive contact with other languages OR when language is limited and unresourceful, which gives rise to the The Gap Theory where you have to go looking into other languages to fill the gaps in your own
- Transformation: when you translate from other languages, it is with a specific goal- To make your language a major world scientific language or make your language fit the imperial language (Empires are inclusive. They seek to make their language universal)
• For polysytem theorists say, dominance is determined quantitively
• Other theorists such as Pascale Casanova look at book reviews, literary journals, radio and TV programs, and at how many critics speak the language to see the cultural capital attached to a particular language: Qualitative approach.
The Gatekeepers
Those who decide what works will be allowed entrance into a language. E.g. Book reviewers and critics.
Translation Ecology
What is the structure in the target culture that’s going to welcome or not welcome the other language?
Problem: Tension between time/space compression ( Movement towards instantaneous time, from airmail, to fax to the Internet) and Durational time (the time it actually takes to work on a translation.
Instantaneity cancels durational time. Makes gaps in understanding.
Centripetal Function of Translation
To conceive translation as a universalizing function. Move towards the global language.
Centrifugal Approach to Translation
To resist universalization by translating more works into your own language.
Johannes Fabien: In his book Time & The Other, says that the colonial traveler is the embodiment of modernity. And, by extension, his language. Through translation, texts in other languages attempt to prove they are as capable as the imperial language.
History assumes the colonized don’t have a history. An assumption that gives the colonizer the right to colonize. To fight that misconception, India, for example, translated texts from various Indian languages to prove its antiquity.
THE NETWORK: The logic of the network is the more nodes you have, the more powerful it gets. For example, if one person has a fax machine, it holds a certain value. If another person buys a fax machine and they connect, it becomes more powerful, and so on. Therefore, the overall power of the network is larger than its parts. If you have a few connections in your network, it becomes unstable. Like if Berlitz has only one German teacher. If you have too many connections you become confused and distracted. Like if you have too many accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on.
Strange Attractors
This way of describing the phenomenon of temporary convergence within a network. Certain nodes in the network attract more nodes than others. Example: SDL and Berlitz are more powerful nodes within their networks because they have more translators.
• One feature of economic activity is the shift from material transformation to symbolic transformation. The more companies expand, the more their business becomes about SYMBOLIC TRANSFORMATION. For example: if you want to sell your house, you need a legal document that proves you own it. Or when a shrink takes his patient’s words and reinterprets them, that’s another form of symbolic transformation.
• Symbolic transformation is at the heart of what translators and the post-industrial economy do.
Attachment
In order to keep a link with someone, you have to spend time. From a translator’s POV, it is the time needed to maintain a high level of spoken, reading and writing levels.
First Order Exchange: Brief contact with something.
Second Order Exchange: When you invest time in a connection.
Translation engages in second-order exchange for people to experience it as a first-order.
• As these multinationals grow, they create countless macro-networks. They all tend to go to the same schools and live in the same neighborhood. As certain languages spread, establishing macro networks of dominance, others form micro-networks of resistance.
Linking Translation to the Political Economy
The developmental state: Massive governmental money invested in economic growth. Translation can become part of the developmental state. It is acceptable if the state is a democracy, but if it’s not, like China, it becomes problematic.
Cosmopolitanism
This raises the question of how you situate translation into the above.
If we look at the impact of Hollywood as an example, there will be two ways of looking at it:
- The infrastructure of distribution is dominated by Hollywood majors.
- It comes from a translated society. So many people of different cultural backgrounds take part in Hollywood.
Neo-Babelinism
Speaking different languages can cause misunderstanding. If we have a global language, we can all communicate. An international language could be created through simplified grammar to allow global mobility of language. Building a tower lest we are scattered on the earth. The link between place and language: if we all speak the same language, we will remain in the same place.
• What is the difference between communication and transmission?
Communication
A message travels from me to each person in the room in the same space and time.
Transmission
Communication of message from one space and time to another.
• What happens to a translation as it travels through time?
Interlingual
Transmission in the same language, as in three people, one Irish, one English and one American. Or if you’re a native speaker of English reading a 14th-century native work.
Intralingual
Sign language, not phonetic- Different system of translation.
Translation
The Latin root of translation. It meant physical movement or displacement first. Then it acquired a second meaning, movement between languages.
There are 3 types of migrants:
- The Global Nomad: A well-educated person who searches for opportunities elsewhere.
- The Post-Industrialist Migrant: Who works for extremely low wages. Migrate or starve.
- Political Refugee: Fleeing conflict.
What is the impact of migration on translation?
As Salman Rushdie puts it, the condition of many people in the world today is that if the Translated Human being. It is a part of the post-colonial experience. With 85% of the world’s land being colonized in the 19th century, translation became a universal condition.
Heteronomous Translator
When you depend on someone else to do the translation for you. For example, when Colombus relied on the indigenous people to do the translation for him. The problem with this type of translation is you can never be sure that it's honest.
Autonomous Translator
Colonizers moved to autonomous translation to where they trained their own people. Example: In 17th France, Colbert, the right-hand man of Louis 16th, set up an institution Les Enfants de Langue, where French children were trained in Turkish, Arabic, or Persian, then sent to these countries. They were considered more reliable the heteronomous translators.
What is the push factor for global migration?
- Demographic trends: Drops in population, like in Germany, Japan and Italy
- Income inequality: Attractions to economies that pay better
- Political Strife
How does migration affect translation?
Linguistic Turn
One of the big projects of WWII was decoding. To crack German codes and translate them into English. In that light, translation became understood as a form of applied linguistics. This came under attack because it wasn’t enough to conquer militarily. As a result, propaganda became very important. This persuasive concept of language began to feed into the Cultural Turn.
Cultural Turn
The idea is that we shouldn’t treat language as a code but as an emotional and historical vessel. As a result, culture became very important in relation to translation.
Linguistic Relativism
The idea is that the language you speak determines how you view the world.
Looking at migrants from a translation POV:
- Translation Assmililation: When you translate yourself into the other’s language and become fully absorbed in it.
- Translation Accommodation: Developed out of fear that one’s whole history is endangered through assimilation. This scenario necessitates that the foreign culture integrates you while respecting your culture and language. For example, you are not allowed to arrest a foreigner in your country using your own language. You have to talk to him on his own. The same applies to health services for foreigners.
In a nutshell, assimilation requires that you change. Accommodation requires that the other reaches out to you.
Multiculturism
The notion that there is no equality without recognition of difference. It allows people to participate equally in society by living as full human beings.
Multiculturalism came under fire because it created a set of mutually exclusive ghettos. For example, Chinatown, Little Italy, expats in the Gulf and so on.
This criticism gave rise to INTERCULTURALISM: A more translatable model that entails that when two cultures come into contact, they are both determined. Also called DOUBLE SWING.
Interculturalism gave rise to two approaches:
- Functional Approach: When you go to a different culture where certain practices are performed differently, e.g. taking your shoes off when you’re invited to someone’s house in Japan. This approach becomes like a checklist of “do’s” and “don’ts.” Culture becomes static.
Post Structuralist Approach: where intercultural contact is determined by power relations and your vision of that different culture, how it’s imagines aesthetically and historically. Still, not all cultures are translatable. There is a power differentiation.
Intrinsic Translation Needs
Where you no longer need to move yourself. The shopkeeper is Chinese, etc. Gives rise to Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.
Extrenisin Translation Needs
Business, trade, and military conquests.
Vernacular Cosmopolitanism
As migration becomes more of a feature of society, experiences of other cultures become a feature of everyday encounters and translation becomes an immediate experience in everyday life.
Transnationalism
When one exists in a foreign country with continual contact with his own. Example: 90% of Turkish immigrants in Germany have satellite TV. As a consequence, the sense of being translated becomes more intense. You are in constant oscillation between both cultures.
Metaphoric View of Translation
For example, translation as a bridge.
Metonymic View of Translation
For example, “the US is not happy about this.” By US, you mean the US government.
The metaphoric view believes that one word can capture all possible meanings, whereas the metonymic is more honest, accurate, and endless.
Periphrases
Something that you have to use very carefully, because the more words, the more costs.
Domestication
Bringing the foreign language into your own. It implies having a translator’s signature.
Foreignizaton
Taking your own language into a foreign language.
Epistomic Framework
Overall understanding of context when translating, as opposed to literal translation.
The sessions are conducted by Mohammed El-Kholy. There will be one full day of independent group work by participants between the two workshop days, during which the group will be asked to translate selected texts that will provide the basis for practical work and discussion during the workshop.
The workshop consists of two full-day sessions held on Friday, June 22, and Sunday, June 24.
- The morning session is held from 11 am to 1 pm
The afternoon session is held from 3 to 5 pm
The sessions will be conducted by Mohammed El-Kholy. On Saturday, June 23, there will be one full day of independent group work by participants between the two workshop days, during which the group will be asked to translate selected texts that will provide the basis for practical work and discussion during the workshop.
Texts for translation will be selected by the scholar-in-residence. Samples of translated workshop texts will be posted on the Center for Translation Studies and NCT Web sites.
New Media is a phrase we use to stand for the profound change in the shape and form of publishing, communication, and representation. In this workshop, Ed Bice will explore what these new forms mean for the practice of translation and the role of the translator. The workshop will traverse the theoretical to the applied; first, a theoretical exploration of representation in the new media setting, then an exploration of the best examples of applied new media translation and a discussion of the ways technology can (and cannot) be employed to augment and facilitate.
Ed Brice Lectures and Workshops
Translation and New Media
New Media is a phrase we use to stand for the profound change in the shape and form of publishing, communication, and representation. In this workshop, Ed Bice will explore what these new forms mean for the practice of translation and the role of the translator. The workshop will traverse the theoretical to the applied; first, a theoretical exploration of representation in the new media setting, then an exploration of the best examples of applied new media translation and a discussion of the ways technology can (and cannot) be employed to augment and facilitate.
• The morning session is held from 10 am to 12 pm
• The afternoon session is held from 1 pm to 3 pm
The sessions will be conducted by Ed Bice, executive director of Meedan for New Media Technologies.
On Saturday, December 15, there will be one full day (10 am -3 pm) of independent group work by participants, during which the group will be asked to translate selected texts that will provide the basis for practical work and discussion during the workshop. Texts for translation will be selected by the scholar-in-residence. Samples of translated workshop texts will be posted on the CTS and NCT websites.
Open configuration options
This translation workshop is part of a larger knowledge dissemination initiative, addressing the academic and discursive gap between local discursive scene and centers of knowledge production in the First World; the interdisciplinary nature of urban studies and the proliferation of borrowed terms from social sciences and humanities; as well as the regional variations of key urban terms, such as public space, mapping, and gentrification.
Translation Workshop: "Towards a Critical Urban Lexicon"
Co-organized by: CLUSTER
AUC Center for Translation Studies (CTS)
Rationale and Objectives:
This translation workshop is part of a larger knowledge dissemination initiative, addressing the academic and discursive gap between local discursive scene and centers of knowledge production in the First World; the interdisciplinary nature of urban studies and the proliferation of borrowed terms from social sciences and humanities; as well as the regional variations of key urban terms, such as public space, mapping and gentrification. It seeks to develop an ongoing platform for a Critical Arabic Urban Lexicon (CAUL) that would build on grounded professional practices and offer an alternative discursive framework to the official media and public discourse.
This workshop aims to bring together experts, both academics and practitioners, in the fields of arts, architecture and urbanism, with a team of linguists and translation experts to develop lists of current terms and concepts that are relevant to local context and urban transformations. These terms, which will be grouped under themes/topics through subsequent sessions, would potentially be linked to bibliography lists and uploaded online as part of the regional platform, PILOT (Public Inter-Libraries Online Technology), CLUSTER is developing, to be launched in December 2016, and already includes libraries from Cairo, Alexandria, Beirut and Amman.
In Cairo: Literary Translation by distinguished translator Humphrey Davies
In Beirut: Classical vs. Modern Arabic by Professor Tarif Khalidi
In Cairo: Literary Translation by distinguished translator Humphrey Davies
In Beirut: Classical vs. Modern Arabic by Professor Tarif Khalidi