A Mapping of Translation in The Euro Med-1

A MAPPING OF TRANSLATION
IN THE EURO-MEDITERRANEAN
REGION
PARTNERS
Banipal, London
ÇEVBIR, Istanbul
European Council of Literary Translators’ Association (CEATL), Brussels
Escuela de Traductores de Toledo, Toledo
King Abdul-Aziz Foundation, Casablanca
Next Page Foundation, Sofia
Goethe Institut, Cairo
Index Translationum (UNESCO)
Institut du monde arabe, Paris
Institut français du Proche-Orient, Damascus, Beirut, Amman, Ramallah
Institute for research and studies in the Arab and Islamic World (IREMAM/MMSH), Aix-en-Provence
Literature Across frontiers, Manchester
Swedish Institute Alexandria, Alexandria
Università degli studi di Napoli l’Orientale, Naples
Saint-Joseph University, Beirut
SUPPORT
The mapping project was accomplished with the support of:
the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures,
the French Ministry of Culture and Communication
as well as
the Conseil régional d’Ile de France
the Institut français
This document is also available in French and Arabic

A MAPPING OF TRANSLATION
IN THE EURO-MEDITERRANEAN
REGION
A project carried out by Transeuropéennes

and the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation
for the Dialogue between Cultures
Conclusions and Recommendations

Final overview and compilation: Ghislaine Glasson Deschaumes
Editing team: Anaïs-Trissa Khatchadourian
The present conclusions and recommendations are the fruit of a
collective effort over a number of months. They have benefited
from the enlightening advice and attentive readings of Yana
Genova, Richard Jacquemond, Mohamed-Sghir Janjar, Elisabeth
Longuenesse, Franck Mermier and Hakan Özkan.
The quantitative overviews were produced with the help of
Sophie Brones
Direction of the project:

Ghislaine Glasson Deschaumes (Transeuropéennes)
and Gemma Aubarell (Fondation Anna Lindh)
Coordination: Anaïs-Trissa Khatchadourian,
with the participation of Virginia Pisano (Transeuropéennes)
and Chaymaa Ramzy (Fondation Anna Lindh).
Foreword............................................................................................................................................6
Introduction.......................................................................................................................................7
1. WHAT BIBLIOGRAPHIC AND STATISTICAL DATA?...................................................... 10

2. THE STATE OF INEQUALITIES........................................................................................... 12
- Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew: at the Peripheries of Translation ................................................ 13
- Into Arabic, Turkish and Hebrew: The Effect of Centralities................................................ 15
- Dominant Languages/Subaltern Languages........................................................................ 18
- Contexts, memories, frontiers................................................................................................ 19
3. PUBLISHERS AND BOOKSHOPS AND THE CHALLENGE OF TRANSLATION..... 22

4. THE STATUS, TRAINING AND MOBILITY OF TRANSLATORS................................... 26
5. TRANSLATING LITERATURE.............................................................................................. 30
6. TRANSLATING THE HUMAN AND SOCIAL SCIENCES................................................ 34
7. TRANSLATING THEATRE: AN OVERVIEW. ..................................................................... 40
8. LIBRARIES AND TRANSLATION. ...................................................................................... 44
Conclusion...................................................................................................................................... 47
Illustrations.................................................................................................................................... 49
Appendices..................................................................................................................................... 50
1.Overviews................................................................................................................................ 50
2.Transversal Studies................................................................................................................ 50
3.Studies by Pairs of Languages.............................................................................................. 51
6
FOREWORD
Almost two years have passed since the launch of an important programme dedicated to translation in the Euro-Medi-
terranean region by the Anna Lindh Foundation in close collaboration with Transeuropéennes. A programme that has
already borne significant fruits and that has seen the active involvement of a variety of organizations and individuals.
The Anna Lindh Foundation considers the importance of translation as a key element for the promotion of intercultural
dialogue between societies and for the strengthening of a common identity founded on cultural diversity. Translation
creates a hidden space of dialogue in a translated book, theatre performance or an interpreted discourse, highlighting
the centrality of the communication process and in the transfer of knowledge.
The idea of undertaking a mapping of the situation of translation in the Euro-Mediterranean region dates back to 2009,
when the Anna Lindh Foundation organized a workshop entitled “Creativity, Mobility and Dialogue” in Greece to identify
the major challenges for the implementation of its regional programme in the cultural field. One of the main recommen-
dations from the workshop was the need to focus on the promotion of translation as a basis for cultural exchanges, to
develop partnerships among the relevant actors engaged in the field and as a first step to initiate a study on the current
situation. One year later, in January 2010 the Foundation adopted the idea that was met positively and accredited by
its national networks members and created the first partnership with the aim of working on “Translation” as a more
intensive and equal practice in the Euro-Mediterranean region.
The mapping with its conclusions and recommendations presented in this synthesis provide key elements in defining
a long-term Euro-Mediterranean Translation Strategy and related actions. It shows the dedication and the commitment
of all the people and the organizations involved towards an outcome of a creative dimension of translation that can be
accessible to everyone and which provides a resourceful material for researchers, a roadmap for cultural operators and
policy tool for decision makers and funders. Furthermore, through this exercise a strong young network of translators,
publishers and other relevant stakeholders from the translation field has been constituted.
Special thanks go to all those who contributed to this tremendous work, and glad that the Anna Lindh Foundation car-
ried it in its portfolio and could count on the support and dedication of its partners. The results of the programme, its
recommendations and conclusions will be widely disseminated and enhanced to promote actions and enrich this field
so significant to build bridges for ideas, cultures, stories and traditions and expand people’s cultural horizons.
Andreu Claret
Executive Director
7
INTRODUCTION
After the creation of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership in 1995, which bore the hopes of a generation for the
making of a link between the two shores of the Mediterranean, a long period of marginalisation of cultural ex-
changes has prevailed. When projects for cultural and artistic cooperation, often under the intercultural banner,
started to emerge, they were rarely accompanied by a critical reflection on the conditions of exchange and of the
nature of the relations thus created. 1 At the same time, a consensual approach to “intercultural dialogue” tended
to make one forget, on the one hand, the reality of the difference of languages, of the worlds that they bear and,
on the other, the impact of cultural hegemonies on the relations between Euro- Mediterranean societies. More
specifically, the cultural and political stakes of translation in Euro-Mediterranean exchanges have never been the
object of any attention whatever, other than on the part of the Committee put in place by Romano Prodi to prefig-
ure the creation of the Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures.
However, as the founding text of the project Translating in the Mediterranean underlines, translation is a lever for
social and cultural development, participating in the renewal of forms and modes of exchange in social, economic,
political, intellectual and artistic domains. Translating democratises access to knowledges and more broadly al-
lows works, ideas, imaginaries to travel. But translation also fertilises language, by incorporating and transposing
new scientific and technical lexicons, new concepts in the human and social sciences, by renewing imaginaries
and modes of representation. By virtue of this, translation leads to a revalorising of languages in their richness
and diversity, in full accord with the priorities of the UNESCO convention on the diversity of cultural expression.
Finally, to translate is also to be confronted with differends and untranslatables, which it is a matter of not cov-
ering up. A gesture of emancipation with regard to a closed conception of identity, to translate is an invitation
to construct a relationship to forms of alterity free from stereotypes and fears. “It is for all these reasons that
translation, as a practice and intercultural goal, must become a long term Euro-Mediterranean priority” the text
concluded. It is on the basis of the shared vision that the partners in the mapping project federated, most of them
members of the network Translating in the Mediterranean.
The mapping of translation in the Mediterranean is an unprecedented fact, as much by virtue of its object as by
the point of view that it adopts. Whereas most reports and studies on Euro-Mediterranean cultural realities con-
centrate on the deficits in the Arab world to be remedied, the present map also questions the practices prevalent
in the European Union, in Turkey, in Israel, and the reality of exchanges between the societies implied in the Union
for the Mediterranean.
The first goal of this mapping, then, is to hold up a mirror, the mirror of translation, to the Euro-Mediterranean
partnership. In effect, what is and what has been the reality of our exchanges today and for the last 20 years, in
the light of translation?
The second goal of this mapping is to clarify the crucial role of the translation of works of the imagination and of
thought (literature, human and social sciences, theatre, children’s writing), in the development of an intercul-
turality, whilst bringing to light the numerous difficulties that it poses in economic, cultural and political terms.
The third goal of this map is to prepare the ground for a Euro-Mediterranean programme, of a structuring nature, of
translation, nourished by supporting knowledge, as much in terms of hitherto non-existent statistical data, as of
the observation of practices. On the basis of its general conclusions, the recommendations drawn from the map
are destined for stakeholders in the Euro-Mediterranean cultural Strategy and the European Neighbourhood Policy
on its ‘Euro-Mediterranean’ side; those responsible for the cultural policies of the member states of the Union for
the Mediterranean; national or private programmes of support for translation; agents in the chain of translation,
that is to say, translators, associations of translators, publishers, bookshops, libraries, the media.
The mapping thus constitutes an immersion in a hitherto neglected aspect of Euro-Mediterranean relations, the
reality of translations and of exchanges in the domains of literature, in the broad sense, and of knowledges in the
human and social sciences. In its execution it resembles a walk deep in a forest, where marked paths are rare and
where the horizon can only be glimpsed after a long journey – inevitably a slow walk, where details abound and
always have to be underlined so as to account for the mosaic diversity of situations.
1 With the exception, for example, of the work undertaken by the European Foundation of Culture in 2007 and 2008, testified to by the book Managing Diversity
(Art and the Art of Organisational Change) Amsterdam, Ed. Metsenshitt, 2008.
8
Started in the Spring of 2010, the map was finished in the Autumn of 2011. In the interval, the financial and eco-
nomic crisis unfolded in Europe, leaving all sorts of uncertainties hanging in the air. In the intervening time, the
Arabic uprisings and revolutions created new realities, doubtless modified perceptions and opened up new possi-
bilities. The contexts are thus shifting and they will inflect the realities of tomorrow. For its part, the map endeav-
ours to determine the constants and the changes in the last 20 to 25 years. The working paths that it sketches
out are inscribed in the longest term of perspectives.
A rather rare and remarkable fact in the contemporary world, in which logics of productivity and efficiency impose
a temporality of immediacy, the mapping of translation in the Mediterranean carried out the slowing down neces-
sary to a better knowledge and understanding of the existent, on the basis of which it is now possible rapidly to
construct long terms strategies and actions.
With regard to the difficulty of the undertaking, the trust that has been displayed in the project must be empha-
sised. Thus we thank all the project partners, the authors of studies and overviews, the teams engaged in the re-
alisation of the work, warmly for their engagement, their devotion, the quality of their work. Similarly, the project
owes much to the intellectual and moral support that writers, translators, academics, publishers, leaders of cul-
tural projects have brought to it, and also to the institutional support of some, who believed in its value. We ex-
press our gratitude to them here.
The present general conclusions aim to set out major tendencies by clarifying as often as possible the complexity
and multiplicity of situations described, the richness of actors. They have neither the pretention nor the ambition
of being exhaustive. They thus call for the reading of the thematic overviews and studies accomplished during
the 18 intense months of work, all of them rich in numerous elements that detail situations and actors, and in
refined analysis. They aim to be markers for a debate “between the shores” that we want to be equal, fecund and
imaginative.
The mapping: who? how?

The running of the project
Proposed by Transeuropéennes during the workshop for the launch of the network and project Translating in the
Mediterranean in October 2008, in Marseille, the idea of a mapping of translation in the Euro-Mediterranean space
attracted the interest of the Anna Lindh Foundation 2, who, in 2010 and 2011, made it the major axis of its Euro-
Mediterranean Programme for translation. This programme was co-organised with Transeuropéennes and Litera-
ture Across Frontiers in 2010, co-organised with Transeuropéennes in 2011. The conception and getting underway
of the mapping project rests on the collective work undertaken since 2009 by the partners in Translating in the
Mediterranean. Without this common dynamic, and without the related support of the Anna Lindh Foundation and
the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, this unlikely work could not have taken form.
In 2010 and 2011, coordinated by Transeuropéennes, the mapping project translated into the commissioning of
69 studies by pairs of languages and themes, themselves coordinated respectively by Transeuropéennes (36),
the Next Page Foundation (21), the Escuela de Traductores de Toledo (4), the Università Orientale (3), Literature
Across Frontiers (3), ÇEVBIR (Turkish Association of Literary Translators) (1), King Abdul-Aziz Foundation (1). Ten
or so overviews were entrusted by Transeuropéennes to academics, researchers, translators, publishing profes-
sionals, so as to put these studies into perspective. The first elements of the map were published on the Tran-
seuropéennes website in December 2010, most of the studies by pairs of languages in the Summer of 2011 and
publication will continue until the start of 2012. Taking into account the unfavourable financial conditions and
tight production deadlines, a certain number of the reports scheduled for publication in 2011 have already been
delayed. Missing reports are signalled in the overviews. 3
2 Chosen priority during the Cultural meeting in Rhodes, organized by the ALF in September 2009.
3 T he complete list of studies by pairs of languages, transversal studies and overviews is given in an appendix. The studies have been published online at
www.transeuropeennes.eu
9
Parallel to this work, preparatory meetings were organised in the Euro-Mediterranean region. They are listed in
an appendix to this document. Discussions and overviews took place in two seminars, one organised by the Anna
Lindh Foundation in 2010 in Alexandria, with Transeuropéennes and Literature Across Frontiers, the other by Tran-
seuropéennes with the Anna Lindh Foundation, at the Royaumont Foundation in June 2011. The general conclu-
sions and recommendations draw on the results of these discussions.
The areas covered

Whilst the majority of studies or research on translation tend to bear exclusively on the description and analysis
of markets and on literature, the mapping takes into account the whole chain of translation: authors, translators,
publishers, bookshops, libraries, programmes of support for translation, the media and can, in that respect, con-
stitute a model.
It covers literary translation in the broadest sense, as it includes the significant section of translation of the hu-
man and social sciences, which are always neglected and yet are fundamental, and theatre and children’s writ-
ing too.
It takes into account translation in all senses/directions: not only from the north to the south, but also from the
south to the north, from the east to the west, from the west to the east, underlining the necessity of renewing the
imaginary geographies that preside over cultural exchange. It includes a necessary quantitative evaluation, but
consists more of an ensemble of qualitative analyses.
Studies and their authors: a breeding ground

All the studies by pairs of languages were produced according to the same terms of reference, fixed in June 2009.
As far as was possible, the studies drew on existing bibliographic data, where reliable and complete. In the major-
ity of cases, they involved a collection of bibliographic data, whenever the volume and accessibility of the data to
be collected allowed it. In cases when the volume of data did not allow detailed referencing or the sources were
judged to be rather random, the mapping operated through estimation. These cases are always indicated, includ-
ing in the graphs that facilitate an understanding of the mapping.
The mapping mobilised roughly 64 literary translators, researchers (doctoral and postdoctoral) knowledgeable
about the world of the book and translation, and/or trained in comparative literature, human and social sciences,
as well as professionals in publishing and reading. 4
The overviews were produced by academics, researchers, experienced professionals and were read by peers.
A part of the studies have been translated into at least two languages, or will be soon. All the overviews will also
be translated into English, French and Arabic, and certain amongst them are also being translated into Turkish.
The project tool-box

A virtual office allowed a set of documents collected during the work, to be made available to the partners in the
project and to those carrying out the studies: bibliographic data, work in progress, useful reports or studies, etc.
This resources centre is still open and continues to be supplied with new documents.
The public internet site for its part responds to the double necessity of publishing the entirety of the results of
the map, the beginnings of a permanent observatory for translation in the Euro-Mediterranean region, and to
constitute a “portal.”
The social network Translating in the Mediterranean

A Facebook group is now open for the authors of the map, the translators, and other people involved in the proc-
esses of translation between the shores, for discussions about the conclusions and recommendations, to com-
plete the gathering of information, to share a certain number of experiences. It is a meeting point for everyone
interested in the development of a Euro-Mediterranean programme for translation.
4 Listed in an appendix.
10 A MAPPING OF TRANSLATION IN THE EURO-MEDITERRANEAN REGION
WHAT
BIBLIOGRAPHIC AND
STATISTICAL DATA?
11
This mapping project has hit the very considerable difficulty consti- To the numerous difficulties linked with establishing bibliogra-
tuted by the absence of reliable, complete and unified bibliographic phies, the question of the classification of titles according to glo-
data in a good number of the countries concerned. National data con- bal library science posed a number of problems, as the current
cerning translated works are often incomplete, omitting the title of categories (which separate literature, religion and philosophy, for
the original work, sometimes the name of the author in the original example) are not necessarily in accordance with the classic Arabic
language, the name of the translator, the language of translation. cultural heritage. An author can thus sometimes be referenced in
‘religion’ and sometimes in ‘philosophy, even ‘literature’.
The data from UNESCO’s Index Translationum, which has in recent
years served systematically as the basis of bibliographic data for Besides the bibliographic data gathered during the studies, the
research and studies on translation, turns out to be very incomplete, project relied on tools that are recognised as models – in particu-
even partial, for the majority of languages and countries treated by lar, on the bibliographic data of translated work in the human and
this mapping. Besides, it includes errors, which have been noted by social sciences constituted by the of King Abdul-Aziz Foundation in
several studies. In short, at the moment, it does not constitute a reli- Casablanca, on the basis of the collection in his library. This foun-
able resource for analyses at the Euro-Mediterranean level. dation provided the model notably for the database project of the
However, the situation of the Index Translationum changed sig- Escuela de Traductores in Toledo. 1
nificantly between the beginning and the end of the map. The im-
mense work that has been undertaken to collect and complete Deficiencies of knowledge, zones of shadow, bear equally on nu-
data must be emphasised and praised. It goes hand in hand with merous other aspects of the chain of translation: the status, train-
the putting into place of new software for the compilation of and ing, remuneration and recognition of translators, the modes of
search for data. The cooperation and willingness of the IT team to working of publishers, and information on the publishing market
make themselves available has been invaluable in clarifying cer- and on libraries, reading practices, etc. In the countries of the Arab
tain data that remained imprecise, on the basis of the most recent world and in other countries that are partners in the Union for the
updates. We would like to express our gratitude to them. Mediterranean, the general lack of statistical data and of the analy-
sis of practices makes the exercise particularly complex.
The authors of the studies for the mapping project have thus had to
carry out detailed bibliographic data collection, both on the ground
and by cross-referencing diverse bibliographic sources. 1 See http://www.uclm.es/escuelatraductores/investigacion/encurso.asp accessed 22nd
October 2011
FOR BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA

 NATIONAL POLICIES:
In countries where bibliographic data is lacking, it is urgent that work be carried out by the governments in question, notably
for national and university libraries, for the constitution of an exhaustive database of translated works, covering public and
private publishing, on the basis of legal depositions.
 A COMMON FORMAT FOR BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA
For the bibliographic entries on translated works, the following data fields should be used: Title / Author (using both writings
where necessary) / Translator /Publisher / Year of Publication / City /Country / Classification /ISBN / Original Title / Language
from which translation has been made /Publisher of the original publication, if possible.
These same data fields should also be used by any other organisation working on setting up thematic bibliographic data-
bases of translated works. Failing this, a simplified Dewey classification should be used.
 A RESPONSIBILITY SHARED BY ALL PUBLISHERS
Publishers do not always provide complete information for the proper indexing of translated books. Publishers should provide
clearer information on the following points: Title / Author (using both writings where necessary) / Translator / Publisher / Year
of publication / City / Country / Classification / ISBN / Original title / Language from which translation was made / Publisher
and year of publication of the original publication.
FOR STATISTICAL DATA

 NATIONAL POLICIES AND THE CULTURAL PARTNERSHIP OF THE UNION FOR THE MEDITERRANEAN:
The development of statistical data in the sector for books, translation and reading should be the object of greater attention
on the part of the public bodies of the member countries of the Union for the Mediterranean.
FOR A EURO-MEDITERRANEAN OBSERVATORY ON TRANSLATION:

 EURO-MEDITERRANEAN COOPERATION
During the seminar at Alexandria, it was recommended that we continue the undertaking started by the mapping project and
maintain the observation of translation in the Euro-Mediterranean space in the years to come. However, this activity only
has a meaning if it is articulated with activities for the development of translation within the Euro-Mediterranean framework.
THE STATE
OF INEQUALITIES
13
The map of translation reveals a general quantitative and qualitative deficit in translation and a flagrant lack
of equality between the two sides of the Mediterranean. It is deeply immersed in the double reality of logics of
centre and periphery that structure exchanges in the region and of the cultural hegemonies that prevail there.
For the first time, numerical estimates have been made possible on a large scale, by recourse to the cross-
referencing of available bibliographies and enquiries on the ground. This data will need to be refined, in the
framework of a more permanent observatory. Besides, the quantitative approach cannot in any case exhaust
the analysis. In effect, the realities of translation in the Euro-Mediterranean region call for a critical qualitative
approach to the entire chain of translation, which is what the present map endeavours to offer.
Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew:

at the Peripheries of Translation
Arabic translated between 1995 and 2010), Italy (317), Serbia (147).
Countries translating between 50 and 60 titles in the same period
In numerous countries in the European Union, one in a thousand are Slovenia, Romania, Poland and Bulgaria, whilst those countries
translations is of an Arabic book, and only rarely does the propor- translating between 40 and 20 titles in 20 years are Finland, Slova-
tion reach one in a hundred. kia, the Czech Republic, Macedonia, Lithuania, Croatia. The absence
of global numerical data for the period 1985 – 2010 for the United
As a source language, Arabic represents 0.64% of the works Kingdom and for Ireland makes it impossible to give percentages for
translated into French between 1985 and 2000 (1065 books the long term. For literature only, translations (UK, the United States,
translated in the period in question), 0.23% in Spain between Egypt) from Arabic into English resulted in 300 titles appearing, 108
1996 and 2010 (472 titles), 0.11% of translated works between of which were published in Cairo. As for translations from Arabic into
1997 and 2008 in Italy (178 titles), 0.09% of translations in Po- Hebrew, they also remain marginal in Israel, in which 20% of the citi-
land between 1986 and 2004 (55 titles). They are almost non- zens are Arabophone (50 titles translated in twenty or so years).
existent in certain countries in Central and Eastern Europe, like
Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and in the Baltic states. Translations from Arabic have grown significantly in the last 25
By contrast they are significant in Serbia and in Bosnia-Herze- years, although unevenly from country to country. This phenom-
govina. It is worth remembering that Arabic is the language of enon, which has become particularly marked in the last decade,
221 million people throughout the world. must, however, be related to the general growth in the number of
translations overall in the countries examined.
The countries that translated the most from Arabic in the last 20
to 25 years are Turkey (1161), France (1065), Bosnia-Herzegovi- Translation from Arabic into the languages of the EU, into Turk-
na (513), then Germany and Switzerland (508), Spain (472 books ish and Hebrew is completely dominated by literary works, and
n From Arabic
1200 Figure 1. Works translated from Arabic, distrib-
uted by languages and major categories in the
1000
last 20-25 years, on the basis of bibliographic
800 counts carried out for the mapping. (NB as the
600 data provided from English is incomplete (only
400 provided for literature), it has not been possible
to establish a comparison for this language).
200
0
0_ 0)
pa 990 0)
ch 95-2 )
Lit lian 85-2 )

Ma ania 989 0)
ian 89- )
0)
nia 90 0)
ish 0- )
7- )
)
ew 85-2 )
0
09
do (19 010
Po (19 010
Cz 198 09
10
0
09
0
1
01
Fr (19 01
01
01
(1 201
19 01
Tu (19 201
(1 201
He (19 01
20
h ( -20
Slo rb ( 0-20
20
n ( -2
-2
-2
Ro ech 5-2
Slo ian ( 0-2

6-
-
nia 89
lis 90
99
Se 99
9
98
9
Ita (19
19
19
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hu
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Cr
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La
Literature Religion Human and Social Sciences Other

more specifically by the works of contemporary authors. In the

last decade, for the European Union, religious publications are
Turkish
often numerically equal to literature “in particular in countries in Turkish represents an even smaller percentage, notably in West-
which there are large native or immigrant Muslim populations” ern Europe: 0.15% of translations into French in 25 years, 0.06%
(Richard Jacquemond). This domination is to the detriment of in Italy in the period 1997-2008, 0.05% in Spanish between 2000
the classic texts, on the one hand, and essays, debates over ide- and 2007, 0.05% in Poland. In Bulgaria it is slightly greater, with
as and work in the human and social sciences on the other. The 0.57% of translations, 1.76% in Macedonia.
human and social sciences generally represent less than 10%, The languages into which Turkish has been translated the most in
even 5% of translations. For example, in France, the EU country the last 20 to 25 years are: German, with 748 titles, French (240),
that translates the most Arab authors, the human and social Greek (189), Bosnian (140), Bulgarian (134), Italian (121), Ara-
sciences represent only 20 out of 1065 titles – that is to say, bic (an estimated 107 titles), Spanish (106), Macedonian (91).
1.87%, scarcely more than in Italy (1.5%) and much less than in For English (the UK, Ireland), for literature alone, only 48 titles
Spain. Richard Jacquemond qualifies these figures by recalling have been counted. In Finnish, Dutch, Polish, Romanian, Serb,
that Arabic comprises a “vast classical heritage for which modern Lithuanian, Croatian, Czech or Slovakian, the number is equal to
bibliometric divisions don’t make much sense (the same works or smaller than 30 titles. Out of the 14 titles translated into Dutch,
are sometimes classified as ‘literature’, sometimes as ‘religion’, 9 were translated via an intermediary language. In Israel, transla-
sometimes as ‘philosophy’)”. tion from Turkish is equally marginal (pending verification, 7 titles
– 0.05% of the total of identified books translated).
However, one of the major givens of the inequality of exchanges
and of the construction of knowledge hegemonies in the Euro-Med- The studies stress a growing interest in Turkish culture since the
iterranean space can be outlined through percentage breakdowns. start of the 1990s, with the number of translations constantly
growing. However, as with Arabic, but with different lines of di-
vision, there are important differences between European coun-
n From Turkish
800 Figure 2. Number of books translated from Turk-

700 ish in the last 20-25 years, on the basis of bib-
600 liographic counts carried out for the mapping.
[Turkish ISBN data]
500
Data provided for English is only provided for
400
literature. Pending verification of the data pro-
300
vided for Hebrew.
200
100
0
te an
Bo ic
Bu ian
h ( Cr n
ce ian
)
h
k
in 7- )
5- )
Ma uan )
ce ian
C h
m h
Slo ian
n
rb
re
85
pa 99 ns
99 08
h 0
ge Itali stim Gree
nc
tc
lis
Ro zec
ria
nia
kia
ab
Se
Lit 201
m
tu
sn
sin oat
an
Du
f S (1 atio
Po
19
(1 20
e
lga
Ar
va
do
r
r
ra
Ge
F
(li
sh
(e
s o an
gli
ew
nis
En
br
Fin
He
ua
ng
La
n From Hebrew Figure 3. Number of books translated from Hebrew

per year, into 5 languages (1995-2010)
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
German Dutch French Four languages of Spain Polish

15
tries. In particular, the Balkan countries, which share a common de Traductores de Toledo (in the languages of Spain), by Literature
Ottoman history with Turkey and also have Muslim and Turko- Across Frontiers (for literature alone in the UK and Ireland), as well as
phone populations, translate proportionally more than other Eu- the data collected by bodies such as the Polish Institute for the Book,
ropean countries. As for translation from Turkish into Arabic, it some trends can be picked out. In the first place, translation from He-
makes some significant disparities between countries appear – brew in the countries of the EU has, like Turkish or Arabic, benefited
Syria evidently having played the role of precursor in translating from a general increase in the number of books translated. In Spain,
an author like Orhan Pamuk since 1989, and constituting a re- the annual average of books translated from Hebrew has more or less
source in the matter of Turkish-Arabic translators. doubled, even if this evolution has been up and down (5 books trans-
The debate over ideas, essays, the human and social sciences lated in 1995, 12 in 2009). In France, in Germany, in the last decade,
translated from Turkish generally occupies a marginal place. The the number of translated titles is relatively large (between 50 and
Balkans are an exception, for the reasons already mentioned, and 70). In Poland, although one could only count 2 titles betwee1990
a marked interest for university and journalistic output concern- -2000, the number of translations in the last 5 years has doubled and
ing Islam has been noted. In Germany, translations from Turkish the average today is ten or so titles a year. The languages into which
bear to a large extent on religious works, religious literature in Hebrew is translated the most are: German, French (around 500 ti-
general, practice included, as well as books on Islam, the history tles), English (168 titles for literature alone in the UK and Ireland),
of Islamism, children’s writing. Spanish (154 in 15 years), Dutch (152), followed by Polish (89 titles)
and Portuguese (86 titles). Still, contemporary literature largely domi-
The available supply in general leaves to one side the major clas- nates, proportionate to the fact that literary creation in modern He-
sics of Ottoman literature and Turkish authors from the first half brew is relatively recent. In France, which can boast a significant Jew-
of the 20th century. The growth in the number of Turkish transla- ish community, numerous books bearing Judaism are translated. In
tions, notably in the last 5 years is due to the Turkish programme countries for which the data allows a comparison (France, Germany,
of support for translation, the TEDA, created in 2005. Holland, Spain), the human and social sciences constitute on average
12% in Germany, 16% in Spain, 10.2% in France. In his study, Yaël Lerer
notes the wide presence of children’s writing translated from Hebrew,
Hebrew notably for stories talking about the Shoah.
Constraints of finance and time encountered during the mapping Translation from Hebrew is supported by the Institute for Translation
process haven’t allowed for the studies to be extended to translation of Hebrew Literature (ITHL), founded in 1962 and which “commis-
from Hebrew into most European languages. However, on the basis sions, supports and/or supervises translations into 66 languages.” 1
of the research of Yaël Lerer and studies carried out by the Escuela
1 www.ithl.org accessed 19th November 11
Into Arabic, Turkish and Hebrew:

The Effect of Centralities
In the last 25 years - and for all genres - English is the dominant
source language for translation into Arabic, Hebrew and Turkish.
Into Arabic
This datum doesn’t constitute a surprise, because it is in the im- The estimates concur on the average of 1500 to 2000 books
age of the observations already made in the EU, notably by the translated per year over ten years – the average being the low-
European Council of Literary Translators’ Association (CEATL) 2 est in the earlier decade. Thus, subject to confirmation, one can
most recently, by expert reports3 or even by academics and re- estimate that around 35000 titles have been translated into Ara-
searchers looking into “globalised publishing” – the sociologist bic in the last 20 years. Richard Jacquemond estimates the glo-
Gisèle Sapiro, for example. 4 The report of the Next Page Founda- bal share of translations in Arab publishing at 6%.
tion Lost and Found in Translation 5 had also brought this phe-
nomenon in the Arab world to light in 2005. English represents 95% of translations in the Gulf States, nearly
75% of translations in Egypt, 72% in the Lebanon, between 20%
and 30% in the Maghreb. French is marginal in the Gulf States,
represents 10% of translations in Egypt, more than 60% of trans-
lations in the Maghreb countries, around 20% in the Lebanon and
in Syria. In total, the number of titles translated from French is
estimated at around 4100 titles.
2 See www.ceatl.org
3 For example the Diversity Report, published annually by Rüdiger Wischenbart Content
and Consulting, http://www.wischenbart.com/diversity/
Languages like German, Spanish or Italian only represent a small
4 Gisèle Sapiro, Les contradictions de la globalisation éditoriale, Nouveau Monde Éditions, percentage of translations – between 1 and 2%. In the area of
January 2009 Greater Beirut, they come after Persian, as the study carried
5 Lost and Found in Translation, http://www.npage.org/en
out by the Union of Arab translators in 2010 shows 6- Persian tion or strengthening of Arab bodies that support translation.
is also present in the Egyptian national programme for transla- The Arab countries that translate the most are Lebanon, Syria,
tion (8.8%) -. The study by the King Abdul-Aziz Foundation shows Egypt and Morocco. Finally it is worth stressing the importance
that 6% of titles in the human and social sciences (including reli- of processes of internal translation, notably in the Maghreb (from
gion, theology) were translated from Persian in the period 2000 French and Amazigh.)
– 2009 7. Even more marginal, the authors of Central and Eastern For English and French, there is a broad range of categories: lit-
Europe or of South-East Europe represent only 130 titles for ten erature, social sciences, philosophy and psychology, geogra-
years for the whole of the Arab world, against 1297 titles counted phy and history, children’s writing, applied sciences and tech-
from Arabic in the eleven languages studied for the mapping. For niques, self help. Except for the German language, for which 34%
Turkish, 107 titles were counted. The presence of Portuguese au- of translations are in the human and social sciences, for Italian
thors, for example, is marginal, despite some being some of the (15%), literature dominates for the most part, sometimes along-
biggest names in global literature. side children’s writing. The variety of languages and the distribu-
tion by genre varies greatly according to country and national
It is incontestable that translation into Arabic has been grow- priorities, the size of the publishing market, the public/private
ing in the last decade in all domains. As underlined by Franck distribution, and support for translation. However, Richard Jac-
Mermier, that derives from the “growth of private publishing in quemond stresses “non-fiction (...) dominates more and more,
Arab countries, since the 1990s which has had important con- that is to say, not only what bibliographies classify and a variety
sequences with regard to the growth and diversification of pub- of human and social sciences, but also what in French is called
lishing supply”, the development of new institutions for quality the ‘livre pratique’ or in English ‘self help books’.”
translation, like the Arab Organisation for Translation, the crea-
6 Study carried out by Zeina Toufeily et Nahwa Skafi) for the UTA, under the direction of
professors Hayssam Kotob and Bassam Baraké, presented by Bassam Baraké at UNESCO in
Paris on February 22nd and 23rd 2010.
7 //catalog.fondation.org.ma/uhtbin/cgisirsi.exe/?ps=2QoNxcGDSB/BC/63570011/60/502/X
accessed 15th December 11
n Into Arabic
Figure 4. Estimated percentage of books
100
translated from English and French into Ara-
90
bic (1990-2010) on the basis of bibliographic
80
70 counts carried out for the mapping.
Other
60
Figure 5. Distribution of the books translated
50
French into Arabic by language and type of book.
40
Nota bene: The absence of complete biblio-
30 English graphical data and the great amount of books
20
do not allow a distribution by category, at this
10
stage of the mapping.
Maghreb Egypt Lebanon, Gulf
countries Syria countries
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
an
ian
ian
ian
ian
rb
h
10
es
nis
lis
ec
is
ria
tia
lia
nia
kia
nia
Se
rm
rk
sn
ar
an
an
Po
gu
Ita
Cz
20
lga
oa
va
Fin
do
ve
Tu
ng
Ge
Bo
hu
m
rtu
Cr
5-
Slo
Slo
Bu
ce
Ro
Hu
Lit
99
Po
Ma
(1
ish
an
Sp
Literature and theater Human and Social Sciences Other

17
Into Turkish are available on the market”. For Hakan Özkan, the opening up of
Turkey to the world and the process of democratisation that ac-
Translations into Turkish show a greater variety of source lan- companied it, the growing number of translators and mediators
guages and genres than translations into Arabic. In Turkish, the between the cultures and languages of other countries and Tur-
period 1987 – 2010, out of 17526 translations, English repre- key, the development and professionalization of the publishing
sents 55.7%, French, 8.63%, Arabic and German around 6%, Span- market, are so many factors contributing to this evolution.
ish, Italian and Greek between 1.5 and 2.5%. The importance of
internal processes of translation - following the linguistic rupture
during the advent of the Turkish Republic - must be underlined: Into Hebrew
translations from Ottoman and Old Turkish represent nearly 10%
of the work of translation. Translations from Kurdish into Turkish In Hebrew, translations from English represent 78% of books trans-
exist, but the data on this needs to be verified. lated in the last 25 years and bear on all domains (literature, hu-
man sciences, self help books, economics, business, sciences and
The overall number of translations grew considerably in Turkey technologies). Then comes French (7.21%) and German 5.83%),
over 20 years. From a large sample of publishers working in the Spanish, Italian and Polish (between 1 and 2%). Other European lan-
domain of translation, and across all genres, Zeyno Pekünlu guages have a very peripheral importance, like Arabic, which repre-
demonstrates that the number of translations from English into sents 0.38% of translations, with 50 titles translated in 25 years.
Turkish multiplied six-fold between the years 1991-1995 and
2006-2010, translations from French, German and Italian hav- A quarter of translations from French into Hebrew bear on work in
ing multiplied four-fold during the same period, with a near three- the human sciences, literature representing 73% of works trans-
fold increase from Spanish. Today, “a broad range of translations lated. The French catalogue indicates a great variety of authors.
of world literature, prize-winning novels, bestsellers and trans- The translations of the human and social sciences in French are
lations in the domains of the human sciences, history, philoso- generally published by specialised publishing houses, with the
phy, psychology, gender studies and young people’s literature support of the book service of the French Embassy.
n Into Turkish
1200 Figure 6. Translations into Turkish between
1000 1987 and 2010 (Turkish ISBN data), by num-
bers of books translated. Traductions en turc
800
1987-2010 (données de l’agence ISBN turque),
600 en nombre de titres traduits.
400 NB: For Turkish, only 220 titles have been iden-
200 itifed for literature. According to Hakan Özkan,
other titles belong to the category of « reli-
0
gion », but this is subject to further inventory.
7- )
)
in 0-2 )
ch 5- )
ew 5- )
Lit lian 85-2 )

Ma ania 989 0)
nia 989 0)
ian 89- )
0)
90 0)
0)
0
ua roa 199 010
10
Fr (19 010
0
10
Po 199 10
Cz 198 09
10
0
01
He (1 201
01
01
(1 201
19 01
19 01
01
s o ian ( )-20
20
ce n ( -20
0
h ( -20
Slo rb ( 0-20
-2
n ( -2
Ro ech 5-2
Slo ian ( 0-2
n ( -2
-2
96
nia 90
0
9
br 98
Se 99
9
19
19
19
Ita 19
19
(1
(1
(
(
(
an
ic
lis
ab
pa
ria
en
rm
an
k
Ar
va
fS
do
ve
lga
Ge
hu
m
C
Bu
ge
ng
La
Literature Religion Human and Social Sciences Others
n Into Hebrew
Figure 7. Translations into Hebrew (1985-
12000
2010), based on Traductions en hébreu (1985-
10000 2010), based on the counting of Y. Lerer for the
study of translations from and into Turkish.
8000
6000
4000
2000
0
sh
Ge h
an
ish
rtu h
Hu se
ian
ish
Ot om c
ng n
s
i
ge
c
tc
ec
lia
r la ia
ab
e
en
gli
i
rm
an
ed
ar
an
Du
Po
gu
ua
Ita
Cz
Ar
En
Fr
ng
Sw
Sp
R
Po
he
Dominant Languages/Subaltern Languages

Intermediary languages The process of legitimation
English, and to a lesser extent French, are not only the languag- Whether authors are translated directly or via an intermediary lan-
es most often translated into Arabic, Turkish and Hebrew. It is guage, the studies show the legitimating power of the Anglo-Saxon,
equally through them, and to a lesser extent through German, French, and even German markets, and the dominant role of so-
that the majority of translations from other, less well-known and called “Western” cultures in the constitution of publishers’ supply
less taught languages pass. Similarly, it is through them that Ara- of translations. Hakan Özkan sees in this state of affairs the prime
bic, Turkish and Hebrew pass towards other languages. will of publishers to take their market share, rather than to valorise a
language, an oeuvre, a culture of their time, and he also emphasises
In Egypt, for example, Sameh Hannah points out that works writ- that the reader seems to do well here “one may even maintain that
ten in French, Italian, Spanish, German, Turkish, Korean, Japa- Turkish readers prefer to read books that have gained recognition
nese are translated via English. This practice is present to vary- because they have been translated into English and into French.” 8
ing degrees in all the countries of the Arab world. In the Maghreb, The same phenomenon also prevails in the Arab world, with the no-
French is the privileged intermediary language for the translation table exception of Turkish literature, for which publishing decisions
of German, even Spanish or Italian authors or those of South-East are made independently in relation to the market. And it is present
Europe. In the Near-East, human and social sciences works writ- in many European countries, when it is a matter of translating Turk-
ten in French are often translated through English. This passage ish or Arabic oeuvres.
via an intermediary language is signalled by the Next Page Foun-
dation as an abundant phenomenon for the translation of Ara- In any case, it is a matter here of an additional effect of centrality in
bic or Turkish into the languages of Central and Eastern Europe. the construction of the centre-periphery relations that are at work in
But it is equally signalled in other European countries. Yaël Lerer cultural exchanges in the Union for the Mediterranean.
shows that English is tending quite systematically to become the
language for mediation and recognition for authors writing in He- Another effect of the subalternity of languages derives from the be-
brew, as well as the intermediary language for translation. haviour of literate bilingual or multi-lingual readers. Whether it is in
the domain of literature or that of the human sciences, the reader
Translations from or into Turkish have not managed to avoid this who has mastered English and/or French prefers to read a German,
practice. Hakan Özkan reports that “a considerable proportion of Spanish or Italian author translated into those languages rather than
the 220 books (of Arab literature) were not translated from the into Arabic or Turkish. It follows that not only do the other languages
original language but from an intermediary language (most no- remain relatively invisible, but that the entire process delegitimiz-
tably English or French).” The translation of an author via French es the translations of other languages. For the Arab world, Richard
or English has a legitimating value for the work translated. But Jacquemond clarifies this reality through the different fortunes that
he also emphasises that one encounters such practices for the processes of Arabicisation have experienced after independence,
translation of Turkish in European countries like Spain, Italy, Den- and by the social realities of diglossia: “A little bit everywhere, the
mark and Lithuania, countries in which it represents 30% of the political and economic elites have used the channels of the teaching
translations. of English and/or French so as to ensure their reproduction and per-
petuate their domination over the rest of society. Being the first buy-
The reality is that of a deficit of translators in the appropriate ers of books, these same elites often privilege reading in the original
languages, which itself results from a patent lack of quality uni- language and thus contribute to the marginalisation of the translat-
versity training for the languages, literatures, and cultures in ed Arab book.” During the seminar at Alexandria, at the halfway stage
question (Middle-Eastern studies in the European Union, Slavic, of the mapping process, the Turkish philosopher Ferda Keskin made
Italian, Scandinavian, even European studies in Arab countries, a similar observation with regard to the translation of the human and
etc.) It also testifies to the lack of involvement or sometimes social sciences into Turkish.
professionalization of publishers, the lack of a will to invest in
quality translations and the general lack of interest that literary
criticism displays for the realities of translation, whether good The social, cultural and
or bad.
educational status of language
One might also advance the hypothesis that accepting the pas- Publishing markets do not exist ex nihilo, they are inscribed in
sage via an intermediary language is an effect of loyalty in rela- political, social, economic and cultural contexts that guide the
tion either to a shared history, including in its conflictual aspects, choices of publishers, readers, bodies providing support for
or in relation to the geopolitical and geocultural realities of the translation. As a key element in contextualisation, the status
moment. Thus in Central and Eastern Europe, for example, before of language and languages in the countries of the Union for the
1989, Russian was the privileged intermediary language. Mediterranean is a crucial element in reflection and future action.
8 Sait Aykut www.onlinearabic.net/onlarnasilogrendi/sait_aykut.asp cited by

Hakan Ozkan in his study of translation from Arabic into Turkish.
19
A first determining fact becomes clear. When a system of higher developed, especially at secondary school”; “only 6178 pupils
level teaching doesn’t offer any university level qualification in were learning Arabic in 2009, that is to say, 1% of the total, ac-
a given language, a culture or “civilisation”, one cannot imagine cording to the Ministry.” The perception of the Arab language as
seeing the development of future generations of literary transla- a language of immigrants rather than the language of a culture,
tors, or even reader-citizens interested in that language. As nu- perpetuates an element of colonial representation. The work un-
merous studies have shown, “cultural diplomacy” is powerless dertaken by Transeuropéennes on the place of Arab authors in
to remedy these deficits. The absence of Italian, Slavic, Scandi- French libraries 10 demonstrates that cultural institutions in gen-
navian or more broadly European studies in Arab universities, the eral are tributary to this logic of representation. In Germany, Turk-
absence of Oriental studies in the many countries of the EU pro- ish can only be studied as a second language, like Italian, Spanish,
duces blindspots for several generations and reinforces the re- Portuguese, in certain Lander; the teaching of Turkish is reserved
duction of supply to the dominant cultures. for Turkophone children only, as complementary teaching of their
maternal language. In Israel, where Arabic is an official language
Another fact participates in the subalternisation of languages: and where the Palestinian and Arabophone population represent
their status in primary or secondary teaching. Rare are the coun- 20% of the Israeli citizens, there is no Arab speaking university.
tries that count a Turkophone or Arabophone population who Most pupils in the Hebrew secondary school system don’t choose
valorise the status of Arabic or Turkish in primary or secondary a living language as a second language (English is the obligato-
teaching. The case of France is paradigmatic. On the very official ry first language), and only 2102 pupils took the Arabic exam in
website langues et cultures arabes 9 of the French Ministry for 2009. Pupils in the Arabic education system have to learn Hebrew
National Education, one can thus read: “Whilst 5 million people as their first, living language, and English as their second.
in France speak Arabic, learning Arabic at school remains under-
10 A ccounts of two seminars organised on this theme are available at
9 www.langue-arabe.fr/ accessed 6th November 2011 www.transeuropeennes.eu/fr/63/bibliotheques_et_traduction
Contexts, memories, frontiers

The mapping of translation in the Euro-Mediterranean region is a Despite a long and “fruitful” history of exchanges with the Arab
powerful developer, in the chemical sense this term has in tradi- world (five centuries of Arab and Muslim domination in the Ibe-
tional photography. It reveals the quality of the relations that the rian peninsula, then the exchanges born of Portuguese commer-
societies engaged in the Union for the Mediterranean do, do not, cial travel and expansion starting in the 15th century in Magh-
or barely maintain, the persistent weight of history, the impact reb, stretching as far as Oman), Arabic studies in Portugal “leave
of contemporary geopolitics. something to be desired” and the volume and quality of Arabic
translations in Portugal feels it. This past has not yet been the
Colonisation of Arab world countries in the past, by Britain (in Egypt, object of re-appropriation. In Spain, by contrast, the creation of
for example), or France (in the Maghreb, Lebanon or Syria), contin- the emblematic Escuela de Traductores de Toledo in 1995 signi-
ues to inflect cultural perceptions and practices of exchange. This is fied a will to include this long obliterated past into the university
something Sameh Hannah and Emmanuel Varlet emphasise, speak- and into contemporary society, reviving the great Al Andalus tra-
ing of the weight of English as a source language in Egypt, of French dition of translation. The recent creation of Casa Arabe, which is
as source language in Lebanon, Syria or the Maghreb, but also of the directed towards the understanding of contemporary Arab socie-
role of Anglophone and Francophone cultures as referents in proc- ties, is inscribed in the same point of view.
esses of social, cultural and political legitimation. In the production
and the travelling of knowledges, these phenomena are even more The inherited lines of division in European history are also leg-
pregnant, the source of internal frontiers. ible in the voyages of works of the imagination and of thinking
“between the shores” of the Mediterranean. In the first place,
With the same ambiguity, the Ottoman history common to Turkey the confrontations between Muslim and Christian worlds,
and the Balkan countries, whether or not it is lived as painful has which Yugoslavian warriors instrumentalised abundantly in the
as its result more intense exchanges. The historical presence in 1990s, continue to leave their mark. In the Czech Republic, in
Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, of significant Turkophone minori- Slovakia, as well as in Slovenia or Croatia that were born from
ties participates in this reality. One translates Turkish into Bul- the partition of ex-Yugoslavia, Turkish and Arabic literatures
garian, Greek and Macedonian much more than into other lan- seem of a great strangeness. Similarly, whilst Germany and
guages of the European Union, and in a more diversified manner, Switzerland translate Turkish and Arab books in great quanti-
with a significant presence in the human and social sciences. ties, Austria abstains.
One may ask the question whether this taste nourishes a real Then, with regard to Hebrew translations, the duty of memory
desire of exchange with the imposing “neighbour” with regard to the Shoah holds a significant place in the politics
Ambiguity can also give way to repression, as Catarina Belo of translation. It is significant that two or three times more He-
shows in her study on the translation of Arabic into Portuguese. brew than Arabic is translated into German and that the majority
of titles bear on the Shoah. In Poland, which has had to confront Ana Belén Díaz García and Bachir Mahyub Rayaa explain that for
its past and the responsibility of Polish authorities in the exter- translation into Spanish “beginning in the 1970s, the aggravation
mination of the Jews of Central Europe during the Second World of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the political engagement
War, the number of translations of Hebrew exceeds that of Turk- of a significant sector of the Spanish university entailed new
ish and Arabic. directions of research characterised by a growing contact with
the socio-political reality of the Arab world.” Mariangela Masullo
Finally, the end of the Cold War has brought about a displacement signals the same phenomenon in Italy after the first Intifada in
of real and imaginary frontiers. If Yana Genova rightly recalls that 1987. Djûke Poppinga observes that this crystallisation consti-
there is no Central or East European model for the translation of tuted a brake on the deployment of other Arab literatures. She
Arabic and Turkish, each country having its own specificities, it indicates that between 1975 and 1995, the choice of books to
nonetheless remains that the effects of the end of the Cold War translate into Dutch was made essentially on the basis of the
participate in the landscape for translation over the last 20 years. social and political engagement of authors around the Palestin-
On the one hand, little trace remains of the old cultural and ideo- ian conflict, the feminist cause, or more generally social injustice
logical solidarities between the countries of the Eastern Bloc and in Arab countries. Analysing translations of Hebrew into English,
Arab socialist countries – amnesia and/or the rejection of this Jasmine Donahaye considers that the traces of the British Man-
period seems to be shared equally between Europe and the Arab date in Palestine and the role played by the United Kingdom in
world. Barbora Černá and Štěpán Macháček show that between the creation of the State of Israel contribute to the interest of
1950 and 1989, Czechoslovakia was characterised by a solid tra- readers for “a certain type of literature written in Hebrew, that
dition of Arab and Islamic studies, and by strict political relations is, works centred on the conflict or the actors having specific po-
with most Arab countries, which constituted the supports for a litical positions on Israeli-Palestinian relations”. She underlines
fairly systematic project of translating classic and contemporary the eclipsing effect that that produces on other aspects of Is-
Arab authors. This movement was interrupted by the fall of the raeli literature. As for translations between Hebrew and Arabic,
Berlin Wall, as much as a result of the opening up of the market if quantitatively they are insignificant, they are always very ex-
economy, which transformed the publishing landscape, as of a posed politically, as the experience of the publisher Yaël Lerer (Al
will to turn ones back on old solidarities. It was necessary to wait Andalus) testifies. Finally, as Emmanuel Varlet emphasises, the
until the new millennium for publishers to cautiously revive their conflict and Israeli colonisation have had the effect of cutting off
interest in the Arab world – “September the 11th” often being cited Palestinians from the local and regional context, whilst choking
as triggering a growing conscious awareness (Barbara Škubić). the local publishing market, thus depriving the Palestinians of
At the same time, the end of the Cold War freed up new horizons access to books published in Lebanon and Syria, translations in-
for translation, and not only in the direction of Western Europe. cluded, and consequently a certain form of relation to the world.
Hakan Özkan shows that Turkish historians have been translated
since 1989, giving access to whole swathes of regional history Finally, with regard to the relations between the Arab world and
that found no place in the grand Soviet narrative. the countries of European Union, there is no choice but to ac-
cept that the inequalities in the movements of translations that
It is this same political polarisation of the Cold War that, for ex- have been reported reproduce in part the inequalities in the
ample, clarifies the first choices for Turkish translation in Eastern movements of people between the shores of the Mediterrane-
Europe or amongst leftist militant publishers in Western Europe an. Restrictive or humiliating policies regarding visas turn work-
– the works of Nazim Hikmet, for example. Petr Kučera’s study of ers (qualified or not), intellectuals, artists, writers, translators,
the translation of Turkish into Czech is full of lessons in this regard. publishers, away from the European Union. Thus one can travel
from North to South, but over the last ten years, travelling from
As for the knot constituted by the Palestine/Israel conflict, it the South to the North of the Mediterranean has become un-
works away in the depths of the currents of translation. In the likely, and passing the frontiers between countries in the South
1970s, in the West as in the East, interest in contemporary remains as difficult as ever. Intellectual and artistic exchanges
Arab literature often crystallised around the Palestinian cause. cannot be dissociated from that reality.
21
FOR A EURO-MEDITERRANEAN TRANSLATION PROGRAMME

The map offers an invitation to think about new geographies and new equilibria. The partners in the Union for the Mediter-
ranean ought to mobilise their efforts to support a genuine Euro-Mediterranean translation programme, which would have
the following objectives:
 To allow a better knowledge of the landscape of translation so as to support concrete projects in pursuing their advocacy
within the Union
 To promote the development of translation in the Euro-Mediterranean region in more systematic, structured and equal
terms, whilst ensuring that existing initiatives are respected and contexts of translation are taken into account
 To encourage and favour the development “between the shores” of exchanges between professionals engaged in
translation, the publication and diffusion of translation, ensuring that a plurality of actors are favoured and that these
exchanges are inscribed within a real policy of mobility (visas included)
 To favour the apparatuses for cooperation between translation programmes, and cultural policies, at whatever level
they are situated
 To facilitate the development of existing networks, in a perspective of opening and in a logic of cooperation of equals
 To encourage the development of informal and university level training in the domain of literary translation, the develop-
ment of training in the stakes of translation in the book trade and for reading, the support for mobility for all the trades
involved in literary translation (literature, human and social sciences, young people’s literature, theatre)
 To rethink the Euro-Mediterranean relation by valorising the travelling of works of the imagination and of thinking
amongst all languages
 To consider that the Euro-Mediterranean dimension is not only geographical, but also cultural, social and political.
FOR RENEWED NATIONAL APPROACHES

 The logic that consists in considering works of imagination and of thought to be national export products, and translation
as a simple means for exporting must be gone beyond, to the profit of a thinking in terms of equal exchange, nourished
over time by a multitude of actors (both public and private)
 Transnational projects for translation in literature, the human and social sciences, theatre, poetry, should be encour-
aged, so as to construct a new logic of relations (one may think of the project “Memories of the Mediterranean” in the
1990s).
TAKING THE CHAIN OF TRANSLATION INTO ACCOUNT

 Alliances, complementarities, solidarities must be found, on the basis of a more complete vision of translation, which
takes the different elements of the chain into account, including the diffusion and promotion of works translated, an
element that is generally neglected
 The reader should not be forgotten, nor under-estimated, in this chain of translation. It is through the reader that the
translation acquires its sense. The reader is curious and is ready to discover and have others discover.
PUBLISHERS
AND BOOKSHOPS
AND THE CHALLENGE
OF TRANSLATION
23
Analysis of the realities of the publishing market contributes fully to this map, and that is why the studies by pairs
of languages and the thematic summaries comprise a whole, detailed section on the publishers involved in a trans-
lation “between the shores”. Now, the map covers the last 20 to 25 years, that is to say, a period of profound eco-
nomic, social, political and cultural changes.
In the old state-run economies, the start of the 1990s marks the turn to the opening up of the market, with the ap-
pearance of private publishing houses that will reorient production in publishing. In his summary on publishers and
libraries, Franck Mermier 1 thus indicates that the “growth of private sector publishing in Arab countries since the
1990s, has had significant consequences with regard to the growth and diversification of what publishers supply”
and that “this phenomenon has reduced the hold of the State on the publishing sector” in countries in which the
two systems continue to cohabit (most notably Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Tunisia). In the countries of Eastern and Cen-
tral Europe, the disappearance of the public sector in publishing has also redefined the landscape. The emergence
of private sector publishers has induced a diversification of publications and a massive growth in published titles.
The movement of translation has been redeployed, essentially to the benefit of the English language. Journals,
which had played an important role in the translation of whole swathes of world literature in the so-called socialist
period have disappeared.
In Turkey, the end of the 1980s marked the democratisation of the country and the renaissance of cultural and
intellectual life after military dictatorship. The flourishing of publishing was, then, borne in part by militant intel-
lectuals who resisted both dictatorship and nationalism and made translation one of their priorities. Post-Franco
Spain is in part inscribed in the same logic.
In other countries, such as France, the positive impact of support given to translation, to publishing and to books-
hops, initiated at the beginning of the 1980s and based particularly on the strengthening of the National Centre for
Letters (CNL), has borne fruit. The birth of new independent, and high quality, publishing houses and the develop-
ment of publishers catalogues in the 1990s testifies to this.
The first decade of the 21st century were marked in Europe and in the United States by the concentration of the
publishing sector, which was integrated into the general evolution of global capitalism. A dizzying growth in the
number of books published each year then followed, notably in the major publishing markets, hand in hand with a
growth in the number of translations. This movement was accompanied by a reduction in the shelf life of books, a
weakening in the independent publishing and bookselling sector – processes that aren’t necessarily to the bene-
fit of autonomy in literary creation and critical thought, nor to the visibility and accessibility of translated books.
One of the responses to this situation has been the creation in 2002 of an International Alliance of Independent
Publishers, which is organised in five networks 2, one of which is Arabophone testifies to the search for new forms
of solidarity in the this context.
In the course of the last decade, the United States has signed free-exchange agreements with European countries,
Turkey and several countries in the Arab world, and in certain cases these include cultural goods.3 The impact of
these agreements on cultural exchange in the Euro-Mediterranean region is still to be studied. Let’s just recall here
that, like the agreements for cooperation between the EU and Euro-Mediterranean partners, they include the ques-
tion of intellectual property and its arrangement in the domain of the rights of authors. These deals had a direct
impact on Arab publishers, who in 2004 at the Frankfurt Book Fair were invited to align their practices with those of
the international market in the matter of buying translation rights. Emmanuel Varlet signals that certain amongst
them have since given up publishing translations, because they lack the finance. How programmes of support for
translation take into account support for the purchasing of rights, which is presented as indispensible for many
publishers, would need more systematic study.
1 Franck Mermier Le livre et la ville: Beyrouth et l’edition arabe, Arles, Actes Sud 2005
2 www.alliance-editeurs.org
3 We recall the significant movement of contestation, of Moroccan filmmakers, artists, and cultural actors at the time of the negotiations between the United States and
Morocco in 2004, for the exclusion of cultural goods from the negotiations.
Market Fragmentation tegrate other key actors into his trade: the translator or advisers
for his editorial choices, the translator him or her self, the indis-
If one excludes Anglo-Saxon, French even German markets, pu- pensible editor for the translation revision, even the interpret-
blishing in the Euro-Mediterranean region presents a fragmen- er, when it comes to promoting the translated book. To publish
ted character. The European Union numbers 27 countries, many translations (well) is, in a certain manner, to construct a network,
of which have a restricted publishing market, because of the low based on a shared understanding of the quality stakes and rela-
number of speakers of their languages. This reality complicates tions of trust, around a language, a literature, a field of knowledge
the task of a publisher wanting to publish translations, the costs or a current of thought. The collective dimension is at the heart of
of which make profiting from them difficult, even if the inter-un- the process of publication of a translated work.
derstanding between neighbouring languages sometimes allows
the market to be expanded. But programmes of support for trans- The translation of Arabic or Turkish into European languages is of-
lation remain determining there, for the enlargement of publishing ten carried by small, independent, publishing houses, who play a
supply and the proposing of new horizons to readers. ground-clearing role. Some arise from the “orientalist model” de-
scribed by Richard Jacquemond in his overview, a model taken by
As for the “pan-Arabic book market”, in Franck Mermier’s eyes it “translators and publishers belonging to or closely linked to the
“still remains subject to multiple constraints, such as the exis- university sector.” Others arise from what he identifies as “the
tence of more or less powerful national censors and economic and ‘proselytising’ model in its two versions, the politico-aesthetic
customs barriers that restrict the circulation of printed material”. (translations dominated by literature) and the religious (the field
Emphasising the weak network of booksellers, the defects of pos- of “Islamic” publishing)”, a model in which “translators and pub-
tal services and the “presence of pernickety censoring of the cir- lishers (...) often come from the source culture or are linked to it
culation of printed material in Arab countries”, he concludes that in different ways and are generally small in size”. The orientalist
“diffusion via the Internet is not a powerful competitor to the tra- model tends to disappear to the profit of the second model, which
ditional vectors of distribution.” And if book fairs, which now exist still lives on. As for the big publishing houses, where the inclusion
in every country in the Arab world, represent a “commercial (and of Arabic, Turkish authors is often valid recognition more gener-
fashionable) opportunity that is particularly prized by publishers ally for the literature of that language, their role as discoverers
because it makes their production flow,” it is also a matter of a phe- rests more on a politics of the author than on a systematic explo-
nomenon that “reveals a flagrant disequilibrium between the Arab ration of a cultural and linguistic field, with the notable exception
East and the Maghreb countries. Maghrebi publishers are in effect of publishing houses such as Lenos, in Switzerland and Actes Sud
poorly represented in book fairs in the Arab East, although Eastern in France, for example.
publishers dominate the book market in the Maghreb.”
Margaret Obank is co-director of Banipal in the UK – a journal that
plays a major role in the translation and diffusion of Arabic au-
Which publishers thors into English. During the meetings for the mapping project,
for which translations? she stressed the fragility of these publisher-discoverers, who head
into the wind and the necessity of acknowledging and supporting
Except when limited to bestsellers of global commercial produc- them. All the studies also converge on the necessity of providing
tion, when one is a publisher, translation is never insignificant. ad hoc support to these actors, who privilege sustained work. Pro-
It is a matter of a difficult bet which obliges the publisher to in- grammes of public support for translation are thus invited to privi-
ALLIANCES, COMPLEMENTARITIES AND SOLIDARITIES

 To translate, and to translate properly, publishers need alliances, complementarities and solidarities. To be read and
appreciated, translated books have to be brought out of their enclaves, they need curiosity and desire.
 Initiatives that promote such dynamics must be encouraged, as much at the local level as at the level of the Euro-
Mediterranean level.
STIMULATING AND PROMOTING JOINT PUBLISHING

 Developing joint publishing is the only solution for enlarging the market for a translated book. The cost of ceding rights
and the costs of translation can be better recouped thanks to the development of joint publishing projects among Arab
publishers (positive examples already exist). The electronic book might constitute one lead, but not necessarily the
only one.
 The question of joint publishing assumes a particularly important form for Palestine, as the Israeli government prevents
books from entering the West Bank and Gaza.
 Partners in joint publishing in the EU and Arab countries should be encouraged, especially in bi or tri-lingual Arab countries.
 Joint publishing could become a criterion to take into account in applications for support for translations
25
lege a logic of partnership with publishers and to take into account The need for greater professionalization of publishers on the
their needs, rather than simply providing support for exporting. The stakes of translation makes itself felt everywhere. The frequent
programmes of foundations like the Robert Bosch Stiftung Founda- recourse to an intermediary language is a symptom of this need.
tion (for translation from Turkish into German), or the Next Page But the non-respect of author rights, the lack of consideration for
Foundation, whose Encounters programme promotes translation the translator, the absence of revision of translations, the absence
between Arabic and Central and Eastern European languages, tes- of promotion for translations are so many areas calling for qualita-
tifies to the logic of dialogue and exchange and how it can be at tive change. The obsession with quantity, with the list that has be-
the heart of a programme of support for translation. Besides, local tween 100 and 1000 titles to be translated, often happens to the
collectives (cities, regions) who offer support for quality publish- detriment of quality and diffusion. But what is the good of trans-
ing and translation, in parallel to the support that they provide for lating a book that is not readable and if it is not going to be read?
festivals and other literary events, open up encouraging perspec-
tives from the point of the view of partnerships. On this point, Franck Mermier notes the structural weakness of
the distribution sector in the Arab world. “In Arab countries, the
In the Arab world, if no-one really knows what the future for pub- territorial net of booksellers is extremely loose, and concentrat-
lishing will look like, in the light of the uprisings and revolutions, ed in capital cities. With some rare exceptions, they only reflect a
one can say that up to 2010 and with the notable exceptions of minimal part of national production, to say nothing of pan-Arabic
Lebanon and Morocco, translation is the privilege of public insti- publishing production.” And as the bookseller Michel Choueiri, of
tutions, who are better endowed financially to deal with buying the El Bourj bookshop in Beirut recall during a study day, the rela-
rights and the costs of translation. However, in Syria, for exam- tionship between publishers and booksellers is not a satisfactory
ple, or in Saudi Arabia, private sector publishing is now a signifi- one, and the paucity of information on the part of publishers are
cant actor in the field of translation. As for the big programmes of often a block on the work of bookshops.
translation in the countries of the Gulf or in Tunisia set up in the
last five years, they are public or quasi-public and only certain of If the network of booksellers in Europe is relatively dense, nota-
them think of their mission in terms of cooperation with the pri- bly in France, where the independent bookshop is in principle the
vate sector. The Arab Organisation for Translation, created in Bei- object of attentive support from public authorities, that doesn’t
rut ten years ago, defends an original position. It is a non-govern- necessarily signify that books translated from Turkish, Arabic or
ment organisation that ensures the diffusion of its translations even Hebrew find their public easily, beyond “niches” of special-
thanks to the Centre for Arab Unity Studies, located in Beirut, and ised readers. Their invisibility on the shelves of bookshops de-
support from different programmes of support for translation. serves to be underlined and one could even say that it is a matter
of a constant for books translated from these languages. In the
bookshops of Istanbul also, Hakan Özkan notes the invisibility of
translated Arab literature.
PRIVILEGE INFORMATION, CONSULTATION AND COOPERATION “BETWEEN THE SHORES”

 Initiatives should be taken so as to encourage the development of relations between Arab, Turkish and European publish-
ers both during and after book fairs.
 It is additionally important to reduce the ignorance and the gap separating local publishers, notably in the Arab world, and
cultural services from other countries offering support for translation.
SUPPORT THE TRANSLATION AND DIFFUSION OF TRANSLATED WORKS

 Publishing quality translations must be at the heart of the preoccupations of publishers (sufficient time and remuneration
for the translator, quality control, giving up the use of intermediary languages). This requirement has to be a condition of
support for translation.
 Small publishing houses, who often have a pioneering role and more room for manoeuvre should be given encouragement,
including support for diffusion.
 Publishing houses, who conduct quality work and allow a more general public to access less “dominant” literatures should
also be supported.
 Faced with the lack of support for translation from Arabic into other languages, programmes of support should be devel-
oped that respect the freedom of choice of publishers.
 Because of the proximity that it generates with readers, the bookshop could and should be valorised and encouraged. The
development of policies for public reading remains the cornerstone for increasing the number of readers and for giving to
them a taste for other imaginaries and horizons of thought.
LE STATUT,
LA FORMATION
ET LA MOBILITÉ
DES TRADUCTEURS
27
A mapping of translation in the Euro-Mediterranean region necessarily involves the bringing to light of the cen-
tral figure of the translator, who is often ignored, even erased, sometimes scorned. All the studies by pairs of lan-
guages involve a section that describes and analyses the status of translators, their level of professionalization,
their visibility in the book and in the literary world (in the broad sense, including the human and social sciences),
their training. Related back to the languages dealt with, they sketch out a typology of translators, outline their
relationship with publishers and with the media, even their role in the elaboration of translation programmes or
programmes for the support of translation. Complementary to these studies, an investigation elaborated in col-
laboration with the European Council of Literary Translators’ Association (CEATL) and translated into Turkish has
been undertaken by Çevbir, the Turkish Association of Literary Translators. The same investigation, translated into
Arabic, has been circulated amongst translators in the Arab world. The present conclusions regarding the status
of the translator thus rely on the overview produced by Martin de Haan for the mapping project, and for the other
questions they take up again the salient data from the studies and the elements of the recommendations from the
intermediary workshop on the project, which took place in Alexandria in November 2010.
The mediator of other worlds In the countries of the European Union, where associations of
translators nevertheless carry out a significant job of raising
There isn’t a single study in the mapping project that doesn’t describe awareness, the basic level of remuneration does not allow literary
the primordial role of the translator for the publisher. He gives the pu- translators to live properly from their work. The studies by CEATL
blisher an interest in and taste for a literature or an author, becomes testify to the large disparities in the purchasing power of transla-
a long-term adviser on his choices, sometimes takes charge of a se- tors, with a differential of 1 to 3 between translators in the UK, Ire-
ries of books. This well-known phenomenon acquires a particular acui- land, France and Sweden – the best off – and those of the Czech
ty for languages that are little spoken or not spoken at all or for little Republic, Greece, Italy and Slovakia – the worst off. In a report that
known cultural horizons. Despite being mediators of other worlds, appeared in the summer of 2011 on the “condition of the transla-
translators have not found their place as such on the literary scene. tor” in France,1 Pierre Assouline emphasizes the relatively good
The translator can even be reproached for imposing his or her authors situation of translators in France in relation to other European
to the detriment of many others, or for translating something diffe- countries, nonetheless noting a deterioration in their levels of re-
rent to what the (national, literary etc.) community expects from him muneration, their relations with publishers, and a persistent lack
or her. However, studies show that translation “between the shores” of recognition on the part of the media. In 2010, the ‘white book
owes as much to the courage of certain major figures of literary trans- of publishing translation’ (Libro Blanco de la traducción editori-
lation as it does to the courage of certain publishers. al en España2) offered a gloomy report on this “condition” for the
Spanish translator: precariousness, unpredictable criteria for re-
muneration, the absence of professionalization, the weaknesss of
The translator is an author associations. Martin de Haan notes the quasi-general absence of
associated revenues (percentage on sales, on reproduction rights,
In the introduction to his overview, Martin de Haan reminds us the rarity of grants for translation or for residence). As for the lack
that translating is “an interpretative act whose quality depends of visibility of the translator (mention on the book cover, visible
on numerous factors: the knowledge of the language and culture mention in the publishers catalogues, citation in the media), that
of departure, the mastery of the language of arrival, a sense of is also quasi-general. Thus the lack of prestige for the craft and
analysis and creativity.” But the quality of this interpretative act low levels of remuneration create a lack of attractiveness for the
also depends on “more concrete factors such as the deadline giv- profession amongst the younger generations. Inversely, the ex-
en to the translator, the tools that are available to him, the finan- istence of recognized university training stands as a guarantor
cial reward he gains or not, even the prestige that his craft enjoys of quality and entails greater social and professional recognition.
in the culture of arrival.” “These factors are evidently connected,
because a lack of prestige often goes together with insufficient In Turkey, the conclusions of Çevbir show that remuneration “in the
remuneration, which, in turn can result in a botch job (...).” form of author rights (for professional literary translators publish-
ing between 3 and 6 books a year – the least numerous) or in the
The legal status of the translator as an author follows from the form of a lump sum (for translators said to be “active” who publish
Berne Convention (article 2), which stipulates that “Translations, 1 to 2 books a year and who do other work in parallel)” is insuffi-
adaptations, arrangements of music and other alterations of a lit- cient, notably when it is a question of lump sums rather than of re-
erary or artistic work shall be protected as original works without muneration by the page. Financial precariousness is worsened by
prejudice to the copyright in the original work.” The Berne Con- virtue of the fact that translators are in general paid after publica-
vention has been signed by all the member countries of the Union tion, and cannot count of associated sources of revenue linked to
for the Mediterranean and the Gulf countries. Martin de Haan em- translation. Except for a few “quality” publishers, there is no typical
phasizes that this convention, “with the rights that follow from it contract and the study underlines the fragile situation of numer-
(notably moral rights) is still not well respected in almost all the ous translators agreeing to work without a contract. Finally – and
countries concerned.” But the economic and social conditions of this situation is not without its ironies – if translators in general
translators are not much more satisfactory.
1 Pierre Assouline, La condition du traducteur, Centre national du livre, Paris, 2011.
2 www.calameo.com/read/0007533587198e49a11c accessed 5th November 2011
lack visibility, except in good publishing houses, they are on the and the translators themselves, confronted with a lack of recogni-
contrary extremely visible to the censors, who treat them as a tar- tion and reputation. For Emmanuel Varlet, what follows is an “indif-
get and prosecute them when they translated books that are conference to the fate of the translated book.”
sidered to be an insult to Turkey or to “public morals.” As a conse-
quence, “it is not rare for a publisher to ask the translator to soften With regard to the censor, if it intervenes officially during the au-
the text so as to avoid problems with the law. For the same reason, thorisation of publication, or even its export, it is not absent in
self-censorship is rather common.” the translation stage. However, it is less a matter here of pursu-
ing translators than of convincing publishers that it is their re-
The situation in the Arab world could be apprehended under sponsibility to anticipate the expectations of the censor. That is
the sign of paradox. As Mohamed-Sghir Janjar reminds us in the why publishers often ask the translator to water down or smooth
study of translation in the human and social sciences into Arabic off the rough edges of the text – when they aren’t intervening di-
(2000-2009), a corollorary of the extension of the process of Ara- rectly so as to cut the text, as Ali Hajji shows. The phenomenon
bisation that several countries have experienced is a growth of of self-censorship on the translator’s part is also frequent and
needs in terms of translation and translators. But this reality has noted in literature as well as in the human and social sciences.
no, or little, effect on the recognition, professionalization, and
training of translators. This paradox, equally noted by Richard To this day there do not exist any representative professional groups
Jacquemond in his overview regarding translation to and from at the regional level, but we can signal the existence of recent initia-
Arabic, is formulated by Martin de Haan in this way: “in nearly all tives, such as the creation of the Union of Arab Translators. When all
Arab countries, the name of the translator appears on the cov- is said and done, translators in the Arab world, like translation itself,
er of the book. This is still the exception in Europe. However, it find themselves in a period of transition. The craft is on the way to
should be noted that this is doubled with a general impression of being recognised, as the institutions and prizes for translation cre-
a scorn for the translator’s craft.” ated in the last decade testify. But, as Martin de Haan stresses, this
“official recognition contrasts with the impression that translators
The status of the translator in the Arab world differs considerably have of not being taken seriously in their work.”
from that of the translator in Europe: he is not considered to be an
author but as a technician offering a service. Author rights bear In Israel, where in the last 25 years, publishing has slid from co-
only on the original work and not on the translation. Translators are operative projects to private publishing, the situation of trans-
not remunerated on the basis of either sales or reprints. There are lators doesn’t seem any better than in many European or Arab
not associated rights (over photocopies, for example). Grants for countries. For Yaël Lerer, this evolution has translated into a
translations are rare and residency for translators even more so. general decline in the quality of translations, with the exception
Also, in many countries in in the EU, translation constitutes a minor of quality publishing houses. The translator is poorly paid and
activity and a source of extra income. Professional literary transla- seems not to benefit from associated revenues. The absence of
tors in the sense already described (main activity, 3 to 6 books a residence grants for translators, of translation prizes, of a na-
year) are rare. Disparities in remuneration are significant not only tional programme of support for translation into Hebrew, with the
on a per country basis but also per translator and/or publisher. The exception of the project HaMif’al LeTirgum Sifrey Mofret (Master-
creation of major programmes of public support for translation in piece Books translation project) demonstrates a more general
the Gulf States has nonetheless brought about an improvement lack of recognition for literary translation and the literary trans-
in levels of remuneration in several countries. But this new real- lator in Israel. Besides, the Israeli Translators Association (ITA),
ity poses problems for the independent publishing sector, which which is made up of 550 members, only includes 30 literary
is obliged to align itself with rates of pay that do not correspond to translators, most good translators not being members. But, in-
the local economy for the book. The major stake of the quality of versely, public support for the translation of Hebrew into other
translation seems often to be under-estimated both by publishers languages is significant.
THE TRANSLATOR IS AN AUTHOR

 The role of the literary translator, in its specificity, must be recognised. The translator is an author and must be recognised as such.
 Consequently, the translator’s legal status must be improved. The stipulations of the Berne Convention, of which all the partners in the
Union for the Mediterranean are signatories, must be applied.
 Publishers must ensure the visibility of translators on the book translated and in their catalogues. The media must refer to the trans-
lator. Libraries should ensure that the translator’s name is recorded when books are catalogued
IMPROVE THE STATUS AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONDITION OF LITERARY TRANSLATORS

 The economic and social precariousness of the translator must be the object of collective and concerted attention on the part of
publishers, translators and programmes of support for translation.
 Professionalization of literary translators must also pass via the improvement of working conditions: access to grants for translation,
possibilities for residence, study trips, appropriate tools.
29
The training of literary translators

In general, university training for literary translators leaves so- Greece, the Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, the Collège de Se-
mething to be desired, even if they are recognized as excellent. neffe in Belgium, the Collège International des traducteurs in Arles,
There exist programmes of study in universities for translation and with its translator Factory. Others favour literary encounters that
interpreting, but in insufficient numbers, and in which literary trans- include work on translation, such as the network Halma’s Litera-
lation is marginal or dealt with in a superficial way. They are general- ture in Flux, Poetry Connection or Word-express run by Literature
ly part of programmes of study of foreign languages. The weakness Across Frontiers, the meetings of the Centre international de poésie
of university training for professional translation is often mentio- in Marseiile, the Maison des écrivains étrangers et des traducteurs
ned. Numerous translators, notably amongst the younger gene- in Saint-Nazaire. Or they make translation the goal of collective wri-
rations, have an insufficient grasp of the language of arrival, even ting, such as at the memorable Centre international de traduction
of the source language, and are sadly lacking in literary or artistic poétique at Royaumont.
culture – even of more general knowledge.
As the studies signal, this informal training concerns literature and
An opposition is often made between the university training of the languages of the EU for the most part and only rarely the hu-
translators and informal training through workshops. But however man and social sciences or other languages around the Mediterra-
good one’s knowledge of a language, it is not enough in order to be nean. Similarly, residencies for translators are rare on the Southern
able to translate well. This is an undertaking that requires a method shores. Let’s praise the creation in Morocco in 2011 of the project
but also an intimate knowledge of one’s own language, knowing how Dar al Ma’mûn, a residency for artists and translators, a centre for
to write, a capacity for imagination and empathy, an intellectual and art and a library.
sensible capacity to stay “between” languages, “between” their re-
sistances. Thus – and because the literary translator gets a training Last but not least, the map shows that authors themselves, nove-
in practice as well as in the learning of languages in pairs, collective lists, poets, playwrights, philosophers add a very significant buil-
workshops are invaluable. The Escuela de Traductores de Toledo, for ding block to the translation edifice, in the literary domain as in the
example, testifies to the fact that happily, these two approaches human and social sciences, when they apply themselves to transla-
can complement each other in a university programme – but the ting their contemporaries. This is a reality that should not be under-
Escuela is still the exception. estimated, because it is fully a part of literary translation. Authors
then play an opening up role, contributing in a significant manner
During the seminar in Alexandria in November 2010, the beneficial to renewing imaginaries and knowledges. One thinks, for example,
role of non-university projects for improving literary translators of Tahar Ben Jalloun, translating Mohammed Choukri’s Le Pain into
throughout their development was recalled. Some of these projects, French in 1980.
around the colleges of translation (or centres for literary transla-
tion) bring together residency and workshops, such as Ekemel in
 Professionalization passes via publishers and translators paying greater attention to the development of quality work.
The translation of literary work or of work in the human and social sciences must be recognised and validated in the career of academics
doing translation.
SUPPORT ORGANISATIONS OF LITERARY TRANSLATORS

 Literary translators should be supported in their attempts at organisation and dialogue, and notably in their efforts to multiply the links
between translators in the Arab world, in Turkey and in the EU.
TRAIN LITERARY TRANSLATORS

 The development of university programmes including specific training for literary translation should be systematically encouraged.
 A particular attention must be given to so-called ‘rare’ languages in these forms of training.
 University training and informal training in workshops must be thought of as complementary.
 The opportunity for a translator to improve themselves through training or a collective translation project is a priority. Consequently,
the development of quality training programmes must be supported.
 The development of collective workshops for translation, finally, must be promoted, most notably in the domains of theatre and the
human and social sciences.
TRANSLATING
LITERATURE
31
If not the novel, nothing!

Literary translation “between the shores” is largely dominated by Turkish literature is dominated by the work of Orhan Pamuk, Nobel
fiction, often in an exclusive manner. Prize winner of 2006, who, it must be recalled, was translated in
In Arabic, classic European novels of the 19th and the first half of Syria in 1989, in the 1990s in France and Germany, before he was
the 20th century that have fallen into the public domain, are om- awarded the Nobel prize. He is followed by authors like Elif Şafak.
nipresent, and several translations can often be counted for the Classic Ottoman or Turkish authors from the start of the 20th centu-
same title. In Tunisia, as Jalel Al-Gharbi emphasises, the transla- ry are little translated, unless it is Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar – a “direct
tions of French classics are in fact adaptations and are “more like consequence of the popularity of Orhan Pamuk’s novels” (Hakan
study notes”. But it should be noted that corpora are still large- Özkan). In the languages where Turkish literature has a greater
ly incomplete. As regards contemporary literature, it is in large presence, small, recently created publishing houses make new or
measure absent. And the contemporary writers translated are less well-known authors more widely known.
often secondary authors. Modern or post-modern prose in other
forms than the the novel is translated more often in Turkish or As for Israeli literature written in Hebrew, one notes there too the
Hebrew than in Arabic. strong presence of novels, alongside life stories and memoirs,
which constitute a significant part of the translations into Ger-
In Arabic, Turkish or Hebrew, priority is given to works that in- man, for example. Major contemporary Israeli authors (notably
carnate the centrality of a “Western” language or culture in rela- Amos Oz, David Grossmann), writing in Hebrew seem to be the
tion to “subaltern cultures”. One notes the glaring absence of the object of a fairly systematic author policy (several titles by the
great Antillean French or Francophone Belgian or Swiss authors, same author in the same language) in most languages in the EU.
the sporadic presence of Indian or African Anglophone authors,
with just a few titles having appeared in Egypt in the last five
years... The presence of Latin-American authors (writing in Span- Bilingual Books
ish or Portuguese) is low. Finally, for translations into Arabic, fe-
male authors seem to be neglected relative to their equivalently In what is offered to readers, the bilingual book unfortunately oc-
well-known male colleagues. cupies a very marginal place in literary publishing, even though all
Inversely, the contemporary Arabic or Turkish novel prevails sorts of bi- or pluri-lingualisms exist in the Euro-Mediterranean re-
massively in the languages of the EU, with a preference for gion. The bilingual book retains an exceptional character, reserved
novels with a socio-ethnographic character, as has been abun- for poetry and for children’s writing, although it is an extraordinary
dantly underlined in the studies. This situation is sometimes so lever for an intercultural apprehension of languages and for the de-
grotesque that it is readily picked out by Arab intellectuals and velopment of a culture of translation. However, one notes a partic-
writers, when the opportunity arises. ular effort in Germany (Turkish/German), in Spain (Spanish/Arabic)
or in the Maghreb countries (Arabic/French/Amazigh).
Once more, the diversity of authors is in proportion to the number
of books translated. With the exception of German, French, Span-
ish, as well as Italian, Arabic literature is better represented, albe- The Criteria for Choosing
it with significant disparities. Everywhere else, one notes the ab-
sence of major contemporary Arab authors, disparate catalogues, “Bestsellerisation” is a general phenomenon, which has a direct im-
the under- or over-representation of certain Arab “regions”. In a pact on intercultural imaginaries. It nourishes the idea that it is enough
general manner, besides Naguib Mafhouz, Nobel Prize winner of for a publisher to take the two or three bestselling books in a publish-
1988, Mahmoud Darwich and Adonis for poetry and Alaa Al-Aswani, ing market of reference to construct a translation policy. But the suc-
author of the bestseller The Yacoubian Building, most contempo- cess of a book on one market doesn’t necessarily entail its success
rary Arabophone authors are at best only accessible in three or on another. Moreover, the bestseller is ambiguous. It can play the role
four languages in the EU. Proportionally, Francophone or Anglo- of a locomotive, carrying readers to other authors translated from the
phone Arab authors (Khalil Gibran, with The Prophet, omnipresent) same language. But it can conceal important authors, interpretations
have been translated more, for some time, notably in Germany or of the world, aesthetic propositions and socio-political realities.
in Central or Eastern Europe (Tahar Ben Jelloun, Amin Maalouf, Literary prizes are another mode of choosing noted in the studies.
Mohamed Dib, Assia Djebar, etc.). In this landscape, Arabic poetry To choose a book according to the literary prize that it has received
represents in general 15-20% of literary translations, but more in in a country poses the question of the adequation between the local
Spanish (a third). Classic Arab authors are little translated, other and the global, such forms of recompense rarely being independent
than in countries that still have a tradition of Middle Eastern stud- of the contingencies of the local publishing market from which they
ies. Finally, tales continue to represent an important part of trans- emanate. The Nobel Prize has incontestably played the role of a light-
lations from Arabic, with The Thousand and One Nights, most nota- house in a vast literary ocean, as the way that awarding the prize to
bly in the domain of young people’s literature. With regards to the Mahfouz and Pamuk has brought along new readers has shown. But
latter, Mathilde Chèvre notes the lack of interest among European it is worth underlining that that this effect is not systematic and its
publishers for contemporary creation in the Arab world. duration is not guaranteed. One may also ask oneself if the strength
From a long time limited to the translation of Yaşar Kemal and Na- of the impact of the Nobel Prize for Literature is not due to the fact
zim Hıkmet, who are present throughout the corpora, translated that it has been awarded to authors from languages and cultures usu-
ally considered peripheral or subaltern in the Western book market. themselves denied a properly literary value” (Richard Jacquemond).
Showing that it is difficult to escape from the logic of the literary prize Basically, the mapping is calling into question the poverty of the im-
but that it is also possible to construct a similar institution as an alter- aginary and of contemporary sensibilities.
native, the recent International Prize for Arab Fiction, created in Abu
Dhabi in 2008 with the support of the Booker Prize Foundation and
the Emirates Foundation, is inscribed in a logic of valorisation of con- Translating “across”
temporary literary creation within the Arab world, on the basis of cri- In the domain of literary creation, whether that be of fiction, poetry
teria of evaluation that keep the expectations and projections of the or theatre, the distance that is created between the original text and
West regarding what Arab literature is and should be, at a distance. its translation, by virtue of the passage through an intermediary lan-
Besides, publishers are often confronted with the logic of the list, guage (the frequency of which we have signalled), tends to discon-
which the major programmes of translation or support for translation nect both the translator and the reader from the sensible world of
are fond of (programmes of Arabic translation that plan between 100 the author, from his or her implicit social or cultural referents, from
and 1000 translations in a given time, lists of recommendations from his or her language games. Even if one properly conceives the effect
foreign cultural services, etc). The criteria that preside over the estab- of the profitability of a translation that serves as the “original” text
lishment of these lists are only rarely made explicit. They often derive for another translation, even if one can clearly see the interest that a
from the priorities that their financiers wish to make prevail without publisher has in purchasing the rights for an important author so as
(daring) to formulate them, and these “propositions” are often dis- to gain a position in the market without knowing whether or there ex-
connected from the real needs of society and the publishing world. ist translators able to do the translation, it is more difficult to picture
the interest that the author or the reader might have in this con trick.
Besides this phenomenon, the leitmotif of the mapping is that trans-
The presentation lations in the literary domain are often of a poor quality in all languag-
of the translated book es, even if there are some spots of excellence. This reality holds most
notably in countries where literary translation and literary transla-
Studies of the translations of Arabic or Turkish offer an anthology of tors are not recognised in their specificity, where publishers don’t
the orientalist clichés used by publishers and/or promoted by the pay much attention to the importance of a successful translation,
media, clichés that draw on the archaic orientalism of the 19th cen- where the support for translation is not conditioned by minimal cri-
tury – including for young people’s literature, which is full of com- teria for quality: the verification of the translator’s qualifications or
monplaces described by Mathilde Chèvre. Book covers make an im- ability, appropriate remuneration, adequate deadlines, contact with
moderate use of the figure of the woman in a veil, of the man in a the author when that is possible, revision of the translation in con-
gallabiya or in a keffieh, cupola in Istanbul or the alleyways of the cert with the translator, absence of censorship of the translated text.
medina. Publishers don’t hesitate to make a travesty of the title, as
Lea Nocera signals for a book whose original Turkish title, ‘The Book-
seller’s house’ was transformed into ‘Hotel Bosphorus’. New publish- Bringing the translated book
ing houses, as Nil Deniz remarks, are now inscribed against the grain
of this tendency. And the recourse to clichés is not absent from the
out of its enclave
translations into Arabic or Turkish, and a bridge in the fog in Prague Last but not least, the responsibility of literary criticism – across
is the ritual hook for selling Kafka or Kundera. It nonetheless remains all media – is engaged. In general, and quite flagrantly, literary criti-
that these biases also govern the promotion of books, their visibility cism displays no interest in what is “translated” in the book trans-
in bookshops and colour the media reception of books. lated, in the “share of the foreign.”1 (Kadhim Jihad) This lack of in-
For Emmanuel Varlet, it follows that “intercultural imaginaries appear terest is injurious to the translator, but also to the very sense of the
to be more and more separate from the realities of the Arab world.” In translation as a gesture and as a project. It must be connected to a
its contemporary translation, the effect of orientalism is that “liter- more general contempt for the cultural and political stakes of trans-
ary works are presented in the form of ethnographic documents or
1 Kadhim Jihad La part de l’étranger : La traduction de la poésie dans la culture arabe, Arles,
testimonies with an ethnographic or literary value and thereby find Actes Sud, 2007.
DIVERSIFY POINTS OF VIEW AND PROPOSITIONS

 T o sum literary translation up as a simple process of the import-export of a “noted” cultural good is almost always to the detriment of
literary creation and intercultural exchanges between societies.
 T here is a need everywhere for greater diversity and greater coherence in the works of literature translated.
FREEDOM FROM STEREOTYPES

 T he perception of the other’s literature is weighed down greatly by stereotypes that publishers and the media make wide use of, as much
at the level of choices as of presentation of works to the public.
 T hese stereotypes are reductive for literature, for the author to whom they assign an identity and for the reader, who they imprison in
presuppositions.
ENCOURAGE LITERARY EXCHANGES IN ALL THEIR DIVERSITY

 T he possibility of multiple literary encounters should be promoted at different levels (local, national, across frontiers, transnational and
regional) and in different languages.
 P rinted or electronic media that promote these literary exchanges should be encouraged.
33
lation in contemporary societies. the same and have been tirelessly translated over the last fifty years,
The translated literary work must be opened up to the world, it must albums tackling the question of children’s psychology” for children.
be given so as to be read, heard, shared. It calls for being brought into “The countries of the EU, for their part, import ‘orientalism’, adapta-
relation with other artistic creations or with the debate over ideas, as tions of The Thousand and One Nights, Sindbad’s adventures and the
is the case with Rencontres Averroès in Marseille. Studies undertak- Caves of Ali Baba, for their children, but do not translate, or translate
en in Italy, France and Spain, for example, show that it is possible to very rarely, the books produced by Arab publishing houses from the
evolve from a very restricted public of specialists to a broader pub- contemporary era.”
lic. Time and a constant effort in publishing, and good translators, are The publication of young people’s literature, however, does join up
needed. But moments for cultural encounter are needed too, in which with the major tendencies noted for literature in general, that is to
readers, publics, have the opportunity to discover an author, not so say, the innovative role of “new publishing houses (in Lebanon,
much as a function of his or her national belonging as of the artistic, Egypt) which promote Arab creation”; “the importance of phenom-
social or political context in which s/he develops, to encounter his or ena of internal translation, or of creation in the French language,
her translator, to hear languages... which is very frequent with children’s publishing houses in the
Once they are opened up to the world and the universe of translation, Maghreb and which one finds some examples of in Lebanon”; the
journals and magazines, whether printed or online, have a central role significant role of small publishers, in France notably, in the transla-
to play here in this bringing into relation and incitement to discovery. As tion of “creations coming from the Arab world, or in the direct com-
the conference organised in Istanbul by Literature Across Frontiers and missioning of the work of Arab authors and illustrators.” Insisting on
the Turkish Ministry for Culture and Tourism has recalled2, electronic the emergence of creation in Arab writing for children as worth being
media, in their two dimensions as information providers and social net- supported and recognised in its own right, she shows that it contrib-
works, are also important places for contextualisation and for debate. utes to creating a context that is favourable to the translation of a
The importance of local literary events, whether one-offs or devel- creative young people’s literature.
oped throughout the year, have been underlined during the Alexan- In the conclusion of her study, Mathilde Chèvre sketched out an anal-
dria seminar. It may be a matter of governments’ cultural initiatives, ysis of the significant processes of adaptation (of images, names,
which are important for opening up routes to discovery (such as with certain aspects of the story) that one finds in the translation of
les Belles Etrangères in France), but also of local projects, provided young people’s literature into Arabic. She insists on the “cultural, reli-
by local associations or collectives in a logic of sharing and participa- gious, educational stakes that are at work in the translation of a book
tion rather than promotion stricto sensu – even in a back and forth for children, during its passage from one language, but also cultural
logic across the shores, in the form of real cultural partnerships, as and religious sphere and identity, to another”, and shows that young
with the very recent Beirut 39, which resulted from cooperation be- people’s literature is a sort of precipitate, in the chemical sense of
tween the Hay on Wye Festival in Wales and Beirut the World Cultural the term, of translation as an intercultural process.
Capital of the Book 2009. The studies carried out for the mapping project for translation to and
from Turkish reveal interesting aspects, which ultimately call for a
more systematic study. The major presence of Turkish children’s
Young people’s literature writing in Germany, which has significant Turkophone population,
and the existence of numerous bilingual books is noted in particu-
In her transverse study of the translation of young people’s literature lar. And in her study of the translation of Swedish into Turkish, An-
from and to Arabic, Mathilde Chèvre shows that Arab publishers im- nika Svahnström notes that in a decade, a hundred titles have been
port and translate “scientific books, dictionaries and encyclopaedias, translated from Swedish into Turkish, connecting this phenomenon
major literary works produced in the West that are always evidently to the global success of Swedish authors writing for children.
2 http://www.lit-across-frontiers.org/projects_detail.php?id=9 accessed 5th November 2011.
PROGRAMMES OF SUPPORT FOR TRANSLATION

 P rogrammes of support for translation are indispensable for encouraging a diversification of translated works, as much in terms of literary
genre as of source languages.
 P rogrammes of support for translation cannot limit themselves to support the translation of a specific work or even of list of works produced
arbitrarily from the position of a bird’s eye view.
 T hey must support the development of structuring initiatives that favour the comprehension of literary movements and encourage qua-
lity translation, its proper diffusion and promotion to the public (journals, whether printed or internet, book fairs, networks of bookshops,
literary encounters or festivals, strengthening of the book chain through the inclusion of the role of libraries).
 T he diversification of source languages for the translation of young people’s literature participates in the development of a curious mind
amongst the younger generations.
THE QUALITY OF TRANSLATIONS

IMPROVEMENT IN THE QUALITY OF TRANSLATIONS IS EVERYONE’S CONCERN:
 P ublishers (the choice of a translator, enough time for a translation, sufficient remuneration, systematic mechanisms for the revision of
translations including the translator, refusal to use an intermediary language);
 If possible, the author him or her self;
 P rogrammes of support for translation, which must ensure the quality of the translations that they support;
 L iterary critics should be trained in commentary on translations and the media made aware of this stake.
TRANSLATING
THE HUMAN
AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
35
Besides the studies of pairs of languages in the mapping project, the overviews regarding translation from and
to Arabic, Turkish and Hebrew, our conclusions rest on four principal sources of reflection: the study carried out
in Casablanca by the King Abdul-Aziz Foundation on his own collection of works translated into Arabic in the
domain of the human and social sciences, between 2000 and 2009, as well as the conference organised by
the King Abdul-Aziz Foundation in Casablanca in November 2010, on “Translating Modern Political Thought”; the
three study days organised in the framework of the platform “Translating the Human and Social Sciences in the
Near East”, which was initiated by the Institut français du Proche-Orient (IFPO) and by Transeuropéennes, in
Beirut (November 2009 and April 2010) and Amman (September 2010); the discussions with the team at IRE-
MAM at Aix en Provence. For reasons of finance and deadlines, the mapping do not yet have available more pro-
longed studies on the translation of the human and social sciences into Turkish and Hebrew. This aspect will be
completed at a later date. The present overview takes up and extends the conclusions presented by Elisabeth
Longuenesse of the IFPO (Beirut) and Mohamed-Sghir Janjar (Casablanca) during the intermediary seminar in
Alexandria in November 2010 and those from the workshop at Royaumont in May 2011.
The status of the human ers are thus more and more frequently mobilised so as to pro-
and social sciences duce local expertise on the basis of specifications formulated us-
ing the terminologies, references and normative frameworks of
and the status of languages their sponsors (NGOs, government agencies, intergovernmental
organisations).2Such work in turn influences the research, forms
The translation of the human and social sciences is a question of problematisation, terminologies. In fact the situation for re-
whose importance is generally under-estimated, and even not search in the Arab world remains deficient, notably on the ground
thought about at all, as much on the South as on the North of the research.
Mediterranean, as much on the part of research institutions and
public bodies as on the part of researchers themselves. It is of- Finally, made fragile everywhere as places for the development
ten related only to the necessity of publishing in English so as to of knowledge in the human and social sciences because of the
guarantee a presence in international referencing systems. The logic of international competition and sometimes because of po-
stakes of translation for the renewal of languages, for education litical control, universities tend to “externalise” debates about
and the development of societies and knowledge are disregarded. ideas. Such debates, however, do not for all that find a place in so-
In global capitalism, in the global competition to be a centre of ciety, where the “official” (public or private) media too often con-
attraction, the rules of which impose a generalisation of quanti- tribute to levelling out and polarisation. The hermetic institution-
fication procedures, the introduction of competition and of rank- al separation between research and culture contributes to this
ing among universities, the ranking of tools for the valorisation state of affairs. Thus, the European Commission, for example, op-
of research, the human and social sciences are both caught in erates a compartmentalisation of the human and social sciences
inappropriate contexts, devalued, and considered to have little in the research “sector” which prevents there being any support
potential, economically, professionally and socially. for the translation of European publishing projects bearing on the
Largely unexplored, the question of linguistic practices in re- debate about ideas and the human and social sciences.
search nevertheless merits particular attention. The current
landscape of the Arabic world, in Turkey and in numerous Euro-
pean countries is effectively one of a growing dissociation be- From Arabic:
tween the language or languages of the production of knowledge
and society. Emphasised in 2008 by the historian Edhem Eldem,
Knowledges on the periphery
during the first working sessions of the group “Translating in the Within the framework now set up, the translation of the human
Mediterranean”, commented on abundantly in the work of the and social sciences appears at the same time as the most un-
mapping studies on the Near East, recently analysed by the so- equal domain in the matter of translations “between the shores”
ciologist Sari Hanafi,1the effects of linguistic separation within and the domain that calls out to societies the most, from the
a field of knowledge, as a function of the language of produc- points of view of the centrality, the hegemony and that of the
tion (local language, international language) de facto entails a conditions of possibility of a co-production of knowledge “be-
compartmentalisation of references and sources used. In the in- tween the shores.”
termediary seminar on the mapping in Alexandria in November At this stage in the mapping project, it has to be said again: the
2010, the philosopher Ferda Keskin made a similar observation contemporary human and social sciences produced in Arabic are
about the human and social sciences in Turkey. not translated, either into the language of the European Union or
into Turkish, and even less into Hebrew. The few translations that
With regard to research, the meetings in Amman and Beirut have do exist (thirty or so in 25 years into French, for example), as Ri-
shown that it is exposed to growing interactions with the demand
2 See in this regard the contribution of the Institute for mental health at the University of Birzeit
for expertise, conceived as the provision of a service. Research- on this subject, during the study day organised by the IFPO and Transeuropéennes in Amman
in September 2010, www.transeuropeennes.eu/en/articles/239
1 Sari Hanafi ‘University Systems in the Arab East: Publish globally and Perish locally vs publish www.transeuropeennes.eu/ressources/pdfs/Compte_rendu_de_la_journee_d_etude_Traduire_
locally and perish globally’ Current Sociology 59 (3) 291-309, 2011 les_sciences_humaines_et_sociales_au_Proche_Orient_Amman_29_septembre_2010_26.pdf
chard Jacquemond summarises, bear on “two domains of choice: Rejoining in this respect the more general phenomenon of the
the debates and polemics around the place of Islam in modern “brain drain” which siphons the energies and competences of
Arab societies (...) and those around the question of women and the South towards the North, and which is denounced in a re-
for the most part only concern a few languages.” curring manner by development NGOs, Mohamed-Sghir Janjar
In any case, the authors translated vary noticeably from one underlines again the components of this paradoxical situation:
country to another. Thus, it is only recently that the Syrian phi- “brilliant Arab researchers (...) fleeing the crisis of the universi-
losopher Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm3 was translated into French, although ties on the Southern shore; the academic fields and publishers
translations of his texts have existed in German and English for in the North, who are strengthened by what they bring; and final-
a long time. Finally, not all the conditions for the good reception ly, the crisis of the assimilation of modern knowledges by Arab
of contemporary Arab authors are always met, because of the societies (in their language), which is aggravated.” The paradox
lack of a critical apparatus and/or because of a low quality trans- culminates in the fact that a part of the programmes of support
lation. As for critical journals, rare are those that, like Transeu- for translation in Arab countries goes towards the translation of
ropéennes, publish and translate Arab authors. Too frequently, knowledges about Arab societies written by Arab intellectuals in
and as has been seen with the Arab revolutions and upheavals, other languages, whilst at the same time, there is a “refusal to
the European gaze remains privileged. In sum, the principal Arab carry out the necessary reforms at the level of university teach-
intellectuals translated into European languages or into Turkish ing likely to reduce the qualitative and quantitative gap on the
are those who write in English (in the first ranks of whom are plane of knowledge (human and social sciences).”4
Edward Said, but also Nawal al-Sadawi) or French (Mohammed
Arkoun, Fatima Mernissi, Tariq Ramadan, Moustapha Safouan). However, as the encounters organised with the IFPO in the Near
With regard to the existing situation, it is also a question of only East, and as the work of Casa Arabe also testifies,5 as it is de-
a small number of authors, and this doesn’t do justice to the rich- voted to translating and making the contemporary Arab world in
ness of production in domains as diverse as philosophy, psycho- Spain better known, there are nuclei of production in the human
analysis, political science, history, sociology, anthropology... and social sciences which deserve to be identified, made visible
As for the translation of classic Arab thinkers, this can be summed and translated.
up in many countries by just a few authors, in the first ranks of
whom figure Al-Ghazali, followed by Ibn Arabi, Ibn Rushd, even
Al Farabi, and more rarely, Ibn Sina, Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Battuta... Let From Turkish, From Hebrew:
us however signal the importance of the renewal of translations,
readings, commentaries on the part of philosophers and histori-
heterogeneous situations
ans of thought like Ali Benmahklouf, Marwan Rashed, Abdessal- More geographically marked – as Hakan Özkan has noticed, the
am Cheddadi, in the francophone domain, so as to reposition Ara- Balkans testify to a certain interest in Turkish work in the his-
bic thinking and its legacy in the 21st century – including from the torical and political fields – translation of Turkish research is
point of view of thinking translation. marginal almost everywhere else. It is nevertheless expanding
It is no surprise that the translation of Arabophone authors via an in numerous fields of knowledge, with a firm grasp of global epis-
intermediary language (French or English) is frequent practice. temological and cultural changes as well as with the major con-
Just recently – and without it being possible to say what the ef- temporary Turkish debates. Turkish authors writing in French,
fect of the Arab revolutions and upheavals will be on the curiosity German or English are nonetheless published and/or translated
of publishers and the public - the argument about the small sizes in different European countries, like the historians İlber Ortalyı,
of the markets involved is generally invoked to explain the lack of Edhem Elden, the sociologist Nilüfer Göle, the political theorist
Arab authors in the publishers human and social science lists. But Ahmet Insel, etc. But one observes that there is little transla-
this information cannot be dissociated from the more general con- tion between the French, English and German of these authors,
text of the perception of the Arab world. The discourse according which reinforces the compartmentalisation already mentioned,
to which there is nothing to translate in contemporary Arab knowl- between the languages of knowledge production and the igno-
edge production merits particular attention here. In the Arab world rance of entire areas of contemporary Turkish critical reflection.
it often originates in self-denigration, and in Europe, from a con- These elements are not anodine, when one considers how viru-
temptuous attitude. But, for Mohamed-Sghir Janjar, this question lent the debate has been about Turkey joining the European Un-
is more complex. In an exchange of emails on the subject of the ion and the nature of the stereotypes that it mobilises, including
present conclusions, he observes that sometimes very young Arab within elite circles.
authors “who work in foreign languages and thus publish in pres- With regard to Israeli authors, they too are also often “between”
tigious collections of European publishers” inscribe their works “in languages, Israeli universities privileging English for research.
the cognitive procedures and epistemological postures that are Most thus write in English and/or Hebrew and the works trans-
recognised amongst their Western peers”, whereas their “Arabo- lated are often either from one language or the other, or both. For
phone colleagues who research and target the Arab public often the most part the works translated concern Israel’s history, the
work according to a global explanatory model which essentialises history of the Jewish people, the history of Zionism, Israeli poli-
social practices and facts instead of historicising them and pro- tics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Their quantity and the nature
viding frameworks to interpret them.” And he adds “not using the of the titles varies depending on the country, public positions
codes, tools and reflexes that have been anchored in the European and sensitivities with regard to the conflict. The “new historians”,
academic field for more than a century, it is difficult for this kind of for example, and more broadly, geographers and urban planners,
Arab work to find translators or a reception in Europe.” philosophers, critical sociologists, remain barely accessible, un-
3 Ces interdits qui nous hantent, Islam, censure, orientalisme Marseille/Aix-en-Provence/Beirut, 4 Email exchange between M-S Janjar and G. GlassonDeschaumes 17.11.11 – 1.12.11
Joint edition Editions Parentheses/MMSH/Ifpo, 2008 5 http://www.casaarabe-ieam.es/
37
less, there too, in maybe three or four languages. In Arabic, it is (30%), thanks notably to the role of the Arabic Organisation for
essentially research institutes like Madar – The Palestinian Fo- Translation (AOT), a very significant development in Syria (61%)
rum for Israeli Studies in Ramallah, and the (Beirut-based) Insti- and in Morocco (54%) – even though Morocco doesn’t have any
tute for Palestine Studies who translate Israeli authors. The politi- specific programme of support for translation. New dynamics in
cal stakes of translation has a divisive effect there as well. translation have also appeared over the last ten years, notably in
Saudi Arabia and in Algeria. Finally, private publishers dominate
the market of translation of the human and social sciences, ex-
A new dynamics of translation cept in Egypt and the Gulf States, where the study reports a “qua-
in the Arab world si-monopoly of the public sector.”
In his introduction to the important study carried out by the King

Abdul-Aziz Foundation in Casablanca of its own collections be- The insufficiencies
tween 2000 and 2009, dated 2010, Mohamed-Sghir Janjar re-
calls the cultural and political challenges of the Arab world: “the
and constraints of the
resumption and consolidation of the process of cultural mod-
ernisation” initiated for some countries at the end of the 19th
translated book
century; the “generalisation of the process of Arabicisation of all A leitmotiv of the map is the lack of visibility of the original title of
stages in teaching, which is an advance in itself” but which “ne- the book translated and the frequent absence of any indication of
cessitates imperatively and in parallel the development of the the language from which the book is translated. This complicates
practice of speaking foreign languages and the diversification the analysis and creates vagueness with regard to the status of
and intensification of the labour of translation”; the challenge the translation. This question is all the more important given that
of a “political nature” that consists in integrating the funda- translation via an intermediary language for languages other than
mentals of political modernity (democracy, citizenship, human French and English is a rather frequent practice. Finally, translat-
rights etc). The Arab revolutions and upheavals of the year 2011 ed books in general lack an appropriate critical apparatus.
and the processes of democratisation that they brought about The studies carried out by pairs of languages, the conferences
by a domino effect do not contradict this vision. They are in- and study days on the translation of the human and social scienc-
scribed in a will to emancipation and freedom and in a move- es undertaken for the mapping project also signal the poor qual-
ment of the taking hold of oneself again for which the holding of ity of numerous translations in the human and social sciences.
elections in Tunisia is another sign. A badly translated book disrupts the understanding of an author
Pointing to an increase of 34% in the number of books translated or a movement of thought, sometimes as far as to result in sheer
by Arab publishers, with an average of 268 books against 198 nonsense. The lack of terminological coherence between several
books in the previous decade, with the human and social scienc- translations of the same author (published in different Arab coun-
es representing between 13 and 18% of the whole of Arab trans- tries), including for the same book, is also a recurring difficulty. In
lations, Mohamed-Sghir Janjar and Hasnaa Dessa nonetheless the light of these observations, one can measure all the better the
point to unequal changes across countries, with a decrease in the paths opened up by the AOT in terms of the professionalization
number of translations in this domain in Kuwait and in Jordan, a of translation in the human and social sciences (the critical ap-
small increase in Egypt (8.7%), a very clear increase in Lebanon paratus, revision of translations, lexicon at the end of the book).
Figure 8. Evolution of the translations into Arabic in the field of Human and Figure 9. Distribution of the translations into Arabic in the field on Human and
social sciences 1990-2009 social sciences, by language (2000-2009)
5000
4500 1400
4000 1200
3500 1000
3000 800
2500 600
2000 400
1500 200
1000 0
500
sh
ch
ian
an
ish
ian
ew
s
ge
en
gli
rm
br
an
rs
ss
ua
0
He
En
Fr
Pe
Ge
Ru
Sp
ng
r la
he
Ot
1990-2000 2000-2009
Finally both the study by Ali Hajji of translation in the Gulf States oun, Wael Hallaq, Moustapha Safouan or Fethi Benslama; Abdel-
and the study days organised with the Institut français du lah Hammoudi, Samir Amin, Hicham Sharabi, Georges Corm, etc).
Proche-Orient have shown the reality of the effects of censor- However, with regard to this last point, in the overview that he of-
ship on the translated text and the phenomenon of self-censor- fers of studies of translation to and from Arabic, Richard Jacque-
ship practised by the translator him- or her-self: Franck Mermier mond places the emphasis more generally on a “re-appropriation
reminded us that censorship also operates on the circulation of of knowledges” in the sense that Saïd described orientalism as a
books between Arab countries. construction of the self by the other: “more than of translation,
The study shows that “French intellectual production (33.5% of we should speak here of the re-appropriation of representations
books translated) constitutes a real competitor for English pro- and knowledges produced abroad and/or by foreign languages.”
duction (48.5% of books translated)” but nevertheless specifies
that it is a matter not only of French authors but of French edi-
tions of authors writing in German, Italian or Spanish. “If one ex- Who translates?
cludes Egypt and the Gulf States, where English constitutes the In the matter of the human and social sciences, the answer to this
principal source language (...) modern and contemporary French simple question is almost always the same and seems to be valid for
thought is very much present in the list of translations published all languages. It is researchers and academics who translate. In bilin-
in Lebanon, Syria and the Maghreb.” Another lesson from study- gual or plurilingual countries, they are obliged to translate their own
ing the catalogue of the King Abdul-Aziz Foundation is the “relative texts, in a permanent to and fro between the local and international.
growth in Arab translations of Iranian intellectual production” ow- Aside from these high level specialists, translators in the human and
ing to “Shiite Arab intellectuals in Lebanon, who make the works of social sciences are generally not (or little) trained in translation (a
contemporary Iranian philosophers and theologists known, along lack of linguistic competence, a weak grasp of the subject matter, a
with (...) thinkers of the so-called reformist current.” Just as for lack of method, a lack of the professional code of ethics). In a general
the literary domain, the study brings out the “weak presence of manner, the decline in levels of linguistic ability and training in the hu-
other European languages” (German, Spanish, Russian or Italian), man and social sciences means that there is a real lack of translators
“the lack of interest in human and social science work published amongst the younger generations. Translation is not included in de-
in Turkish, with the exception of the texts of a mystic thinker such gree courses in the human and social sciences. The fact of translating
as Nawrassi”, in Hebrew work too, and it also notes the absence of a work is not considered to be research work for a university career.
any Arabic translations from ancient languages. And the prevention of mobility amongst students and researchers in
The study show that three-quarters of translations into Arabic the Arab world - because of the restrictive policy in the EU regarding
come from fields of knowledge that are important for research in visas - now prevents numerous young researchers from coming to get
Arabic today: the study of social facts, history, political science; a training in European universities, thus cutting off a fruitful link - that
literary and linguistic studies, philosophy; studies of Islam as a could have existed for the previous generations – between the fact of
religion and as a civilisation. In concluding a detailed analysis studying in a country, of making intellectual and scientific connec-
of these translations, the study highlights some major absenc- tions there, and then translating.
es, including that of comparative religion, and it underlines the Finally, there is a convergence of views on the fact that transla-
major tendencies: that of a renewed interest in the classics, a tors in the human and social sciences must, in the first place, be
continued interest in contemporary French thought (but notes trained in the discipline or in the problematics that they are trans-
important contemporary authors and currents of thought are lating, and that they can and should be trained in the method and
missing), that of research into new Islamic thought and that of art of translation properly so-called.
the re-appropriation of authors of an Arab origin (Mohamed Ark-
Figure 10. Distribution (in percentages) of the Human and social sciences translations into Arabic, by field (2000-2009)
18,00%
16,00%
14,00%
12,00%
10,00%
8,00%
6,00%
4,00%
2,00%
0,OO%
y
ce
Ec m
em s
Ed gy
Ge ion
y
aw
lig syc s
Co hris y
dr y
Cr gion
de
die
t
log
or
ph
om
ph
log
it
ion log
a
ais
ep e ar
jec
ien
Tra
olo
pa ian
L
at
Isl
st
so
ra
tu
po
ion ho
o
eli
n
ud
ub
uc
Hi
sc
n/
Re imin
nd Fin
t
o
og
ilo
ys
ro
/J
ls
gio
l
Ph
ist
ca
th
re
ar
ra
/C
P
li
An
er
ne
lit
Re
lig
Lit
y/
Po
m
Ge
log
ya
Re
cio
or
So
st
Hi
39
THE HUMAN AND SOCIAL SCIENCES: A STAKE FOR EURO-MEDITERRANEAN COOPERATION

 I nstead of the secondary status to which they are too often reduced, the human and social sciences must be recognised
for their role in the development of knowledges and societies, and for social debate.
 C onsequently, the translation of the human and social sciences must become a priority for the Euro-Mediterranean part-
nership. In effect, it doesn’t just have academics, researchers, and students as their addressees. It also participates in
the development of a critical space in society. To translate is thus to invite readers to the banquet of ideas for constructing
the common.
 S upport for translation works in the human and social sciences is a necessity. However, it must be the object of a concerted
and coherent approach, taking into account the entire translation chain, here too.
W hilst reinforcing and supporting the translation of the human and social sciences in the Arab world, this passes via new
geographies in the journey of ideas and knowledges, which reduce the effects of centralisation in the production and dif-
fusion of knowledges.
SUPPORT THE EMERGENCE OF NEW FORMS OF COOPERATION

 T ranslation in the human and social sciences is a locus for and a mode of production of knowledges in its own right and
should be recognised and valorised as such, as much by the university and research (as institutions), as by researchers,
translators, publishers, and commentators. The development of this locus in its own right calls for new forms of work and
cooperation, beyond just inter-university partnerships, and new forms of support taking into account the whole process
of translation, including during its collective phases.
PROPOSE THROUGH CONSULTATION, CHOOSE THROUGH CONSULTATION

 T ranslation in the human and social sciences has a major role in helping in the constitution of knowledges and in the open-
ing up of other modes of apprehension of the world. With regard to the needs identified, the constitution of lists of “missing”
authors is not sufficient to address this role.
N ational policies for the import and export of production in the human and social sciences ought then to give way to sys-
tematic consultation at the local level, the better to take into account the priorities of publishers, translators, academics
and researchers.
 O n the transnational and regional level, consultation between programmes supporting translation should favour greater
transparency and coherence.
CREATING THE CONDITIONS FOR THE RECEPTION OF TRANSLATED WORK

W hether one organises translation in terms of fields of knowledge or in terms of problematics, it matters most to ensure
that different levels of access are proposed: the complete corpus for key authors, collections of fundamental texts on
a specific theme, collections of commentaries clarifying a field of knowledge, all allowing for a better apprehension of
epistemological frameworks.
 A longside translations of a scientific character, accompanied by a critical apparatus, even a lexicon, the publication of
works destined for a large public also deserves to be developed.
 T he articulation between the needs identified on the local level and the circulation of ideas on the global level should be
the object of permanent attention.
CO-PUBLISHING
 T aking into account the small size of the markets in question, encouraging co-publishing projects for the translation of
the human and social sciences is fundamental, as is creating the conditions for collective work between publishers, in
contexts that favour the encounter of researchers and translators.
FURTHERING THE TRAINING AND MOBILITY OF AND ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN TRANSLATORS

 T he mobility of translators, like that of researchers, is fundamental, and for the human and social sciences, it must be
matched by the placing of translators in existing research contexts (laboratories, universities, institutes, etc.)
 T he training of translators in the human and social sciences calls for specific apparatus allowing for the coupling of
linguistic and disciplinary competences. Collective experiments in university training or in less formal contexts must be
encouraged.
 T raining, like the improvement in the quality of translations passes via access to sources, to the tools of work (dictionar-
ies, lexicons etc), indeed to previous translations or to translations published elsewhere by a same author or in the same
problematic.
CONCEIVING NEW FORMS OF COOPERATION FOR TRANSLATING THE HUMAN AND SOCIAL SCIENCES”
 T he partners of “Translating in the Mediterranean” involved in research and translation in the human and social sciences,
who are also involved in different stages in the mapping project, underline the necessity to create a permanent and inde-
pendent mechanism for consulting, debating, deliberating and cooperating on translation projects to be conducted in the
field of human and social sciences, on the Euro-Mediterranean level, with means of work on the long term, and state their
willingness to engage in such a platform.
TRANSLATING
THEATRE:
AN OVERVIEW
41
At the edge between the worlds of publishing and the performing arts, the translation of theatrical works raises a set
of questions that touch on theatre as a public space, the role and responsibility of cultural institutions in the opening
onto other worlds, the status of dramatic writing and theatrical work, the economies of the performing arts, cultural
memory and hegemonies. The particularity of theatre translation is to be attached not just to the words and sounds
of language, like any other translation, but to the body itself, situated in space and time. It is not the object of this
present overview to propose a mapping of corpora translated in one or other of the language of the Euro-Mediterra-
nean space – a task for which the bibliographical, technical and financial means are presently lacking – notably for
theatre translation to and from Hebrew. It aims to underline some of the contemporary stakes of the journey of works
of drama “between the shores” and the possibilities for more equal exchange. It relies most notably on the studies
carried out by Virginie Symaniec and Jumana Al-Yasiri in the context of the mapping project, whilst providing com-
plementary lighting, and it aims above all to set the terms of a debate that could be set up as a possible follow up to
the mapping project.
The specificity of theatre dialectical forms of Arabic and of genuine processes of adapta-
tion, in which the zest of “local colour” (Al-Yasiri) was sought. In
translation and publishing popular representations, the translated work then often serves as
a roundabout way of criticising the dominant power.
Virginie Symaniec shows the difficulty of indexing the “singular Neither karaköz nor European theatre arrives in virgin lands – far
problematic of theatre translation on the domain of the book indus- from it. Forms of drama, inscribed in oral transmission, and im-
try only” and the necessity of appealing to other types of research provisation, and which are acted in the street, in squares, are di-
than bibliographic data to determine the realities of theatre transla- verse and of great vitality: tales, oral jousting, improvised story
tion – a difficulty which is generally valid (between languages in the telling inspired by the maqâmât, etc. But the development of Eu-
EU, Arabic, Turkish and Hebrew). Consequently, when one talks of ropean theatre marginalises these forms, relegating them to the
theatre publishing and a fortiori, theatre translation, which does not rural world, promoting an ethnographic approach to them, which,
necessarily have the same “repertoire” function as the text in the the mapping doesn’t fail to point out, continues to this day.
original language, it is therefore fundamentally important to take Are they mutually exclusive? It is interesting to note that several
into account the realities of the performing arts. great contemporary artists have devoted themselves to remaking
Today, when the practice subtitling texts has become very com- the link, to recovering these forms left in the margins. Thus, the work
mon, the question of the publishing of theatre works themselves of Tayeb Seddiki, in Morocco, “alternating the maqâmât (sessions)
is posed in different terms. Virginie Symaniec notes that “the pub- of Harîrî and of El Hamadhânî and the most advanced Western rep-
lication of a staged theatre text represents an extra cost in the ertoire” (Boudjedra) show that this is not the case at all. And it is
production budget which is already often difficult to raise.” not insignificant that two contemporary composers, Ahmed Essyad
In fact, in the end, a broader reflection on the travelling of theatre prac- (Morocco) and Zad Moultaqa (Lebanon) have found inspiration here
tices, aesthetics and works, on the reality of the exchanges that this – the former with his admirable Necklace of Ruses (1994), based on
signals, will be privileged. The analysis of bibliographic data is an in- the text of the maqâmât of El Hamadhânî, and the second with the
teresting indicator but a more structured reflection on the translation no less admirable Zajal (2010) – the name of the ancestral “oral,
of theatre “between the shores” cannot be reduced to this. poetic and musical jousting” which after having spread throughout
the Mediterranean basin still lives on today in Lebanon and in Egypt.
Translating dilemmas In her study, Jumana Al-Yasiri situated the movement for translating
and publishing theatre in classical Arabic in the 1960s, linking it to
In a text published in the 1996 for an issue of Transeuropéennes the emergence of artists trained in Europe. However, Arab directors
coedited with the International Experimental Theater Meeting very quickly experience the limits of the exercise, both because clas-
(IETM) entitled ‘Theatre and Public Space’1, the writer Rachid Boud- sic Arabic seems not to be well adapted to the body or to the language
jedra recalled how the theatre developed in the Arab-Muslim world of theatre, but also because the themes of Western theatre seem ex-
on the basis of successive imperial regimes. The Ottoman Empire ternal to local reality. In the issue of Transeuropéennes already men-
brought in the Arab world the shadow theatre of karaköz. Anchored tioned, the director Fadhel Jaïbi tells of his growing awareness that
in the oral tradition, improvisation and theatrical play, karaköz “the Tunisian had never dreamed on the basis of the same but always
“played in the streets, would compete with storytellers, who of- through the interposition of the other.” “I very quickly thought (...)
ten had unprecedented capacities for acting, miming, staging the that it was necessary to invent a dramaturgy of the ‘here and now’
stories that they would tell to enormous crowds sat on the ground, based on our own lives, our own mythologies, from which the mythol-
subjugated by the talents of the speakers” Boudjedra writes. The ogy of the everyday, the mythology that interpellates individual and
implanting of so-called Western theatre is the result of French and collective Tunisian consciousness, ought not to be expelled.” New,
British colonisation. First aimed at Europeans living in the colo- Arabophone authors appear. At the same time, the relationship to
nised lands, it progressively became the object of translation in translated European texts is transformed, in the direction of a “more
audacious creativity and an acerbic critique as much of oneself as
1 Transeuropéennes issue n°11, ‘Théâtre et espace public/Theater and Public space’, of the other” (Boudjedra).
Paris, 1996
Dialectal Arabic, that spoken by the actors, Jumana Al-Yasiri notes, Despite the predominance of classic authors such as Tawfik al-Hak-
is currently privileged and one thus sees the appearance of a di- im and Saadallah Wannous, and French-Arab bilingual authors, Ju-
chotomy between translations that continue to be published in clas- mana Al-Yasiri remarks that contemporary authors, whose writing
sical Arabic and their “re-adaptation by directors with less and less is strongly “politicised”, encounter an audience of a “curious and in-
of a ‘complex’, principally in local dialects (like Richard III: An Arab tellectual European public” (Rabieh Mroué,Lebanon, Riad Masarwi,
Tragedy directed by the Kuweiti Sulaiman al-Bassam in 2007) 2.” Re- Palestine, Taher Najib, Israel). However, she signals the vitality of
garding quality translations into literary Arabic “they are often the projects that favour young Arab creation in the Anglo-Saxon world,
work of translators who come from the theatre (Marie Elias for Dario particularly in the United Kingdom, where the Royal Court in London
Fo, Hanan Kassab-Hassan for Jean Genet, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra for has “taken the initiative to present this new writing in the heat of ac-
Shakespeare, Mohammed Ismaël Mohamed for Pirandello).” tuality in the context of the project After the Spring: New Short Plays
Finally, theatre translation is also exposed to censorship and self-cen- from the Arab World. 6 Arab cultural institutions, notably from the
sorship, as much in terms of the text itself (sometimes cut or rewrit- Gulf, are associated with these initiatives, because of the mediat-
ten accordingly) as in terms of the choice of contemporary authors. ing role of the passage via the English language and the Anglo-Saxon
market, as is the case for Gulf Stage7, which proposes online record-
Support for theatre translation in Arabic is essentially handled by ings of young theatre companies from Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar,
the cultural services such as the Institut français (funding for sup- Saudi-Arabia and the United Arab Emirates with English subtitles.
port for surtitling of French theatrical works, the programme An ac-
tor, an author 3), the Goethe Institut, the Italian Cultural Centre in Cai- Launched in November 2011 in Marseille and mobilising anoth-
ro. The British Council – but less for the translation of contemporary er linguistic centrality (Arab/French), the project “Dramaturgies
British theatre than its exporting, via the website Digital Theatre. 4 contemporaines du monde arabe”, co-produced by the System
In spite of these observations, there nonetheless exists in the Arab Friche Theatre with three artistic and cultural operators from
world a real opening up to “a new theatre from elsewhere”, which the the Arab world – Shams (Lebanon), El Teatro (Tunisia) and Al Ha-
International Festival for Experimental Theatre in Cairo is the most rah (Palestine) This projects aims at “the research, collection
official part, and which is translated by the emergence in recent and bringing into light of thirty or so theatrical texts (...) writ-
years, of new international festivals. Besides the work of opening ten by young playwrights” from the Arab world, and at “support-
up internationally by certain theatre companies in the major Arab ing young Arab creation through the setting up of residences for
capitals, the last decade has also seen the emergence of structuring creation”. It includes in support for translation and for bilingual
initiatives centred on the support for independent artists, most no- publications. The SIWA platform, created in 2007 7 puts at the cen-
tably in the theatre, like the Studio Emad Eddin 5 created by Ahmed tre of its work “modes of creation and representation in the con-
El Attar in Cairo in 2005, which draws together resident artists, writ- temporary Arab world” by opening up linguistic and geographical
ing workshops, international cooperation and production activities. itineraries , in the direction of Berlin, Taroudant, Baghad, Erbil...
The major role played by Meeting Points must be underlined here

Arab theatre: a blind point? too – an itinerant, pluridisciplinary biennial in the Arab world and
in Europe, which has six meetings to its credit and is organised by
However, there is no choice but to accept that the artists who gave the Young Arab Theatre Fund 8 (Brussels). It brings about genu-
birth to contemporary Arab theatre like those of the young generation ine decompartmentalisations in the same way that the network
remain largely invisible in the EU, rarely put on programmes, translated Danse Bassin Mediterranée has been able to do for dance.
or commented – with the exception of some, such as Fadhel Jaïbi and
Jalila Baccar, Rabieh Mroué, Ahmed El Attar – and in a small number of Finally, and if “contemporary Arab theatre recently translated
countries. (Let’s recall that the internationally recognised author Wajdi into European languages, without necessarily being published,
Mouawad writes in French and works in France). The bibliographic data passes directly via the stage and surtitling” (Yumana Al-Yasiri),
from the map shows a quasi-systematic absence of Arab theatre, with it must still be stressed that it is often the authors themselves
a few exceptions. In a country like France, where Arab authors are better who translate themselves, as with Fadhel Jaïbi and Jalila Baccar,
known and more widely read than elsewhere, and which has numerous or Taoufik Jelali, whose plays are staged in Tunisia in Tunisian
Arabophone citizens, it is not unusual to hear professionals invoking too dialect surtitled in French, thus joining back up again with the
great a difference in aesthetics so as to justify this indifference... processes of self-translation amply documented in the human
and social sciences.
Jumana Al-Yasiri sums up the situation as follows: “the playwrights from
North of the Mediterranean have a tendency to adapt non-dramatic Arab
texts (The Thousand and One Nights, tales, poems...) rather than tack- Turkish theatre, forgotten
ling the theatre writing of the South. Thus, the Egyptian author Tawfiq al-
Hakim (1898-1987), an emblematic figure of Arab theatre writing of the In the Ottoman Empire, as in the Arab world, dramatic forms were
first half of the 20th century, the first translation of whom goes back to both rich and diversified, with tales, shadow theatre, street thea-
1936 (Scheherazade), which to this day has beaten all records in terms tre, all of its nourished by very diverse sources, from the Persian
of translation into European languages, although the majority of Arab world to the Mosaic contributions of the peoples of Anatolia. Having
practitioners consider that his writing cannot be adapted for the stage, sketched out this landscape, Virginie Symaniec stresses that the
despite (or because) of its poetic qualities.” arrival of European theatre towards the middle of the 19th century
2 Richard III: An Arab Tragedy, adaptation for the stage, not published. 6 After the Spring: New Short Plays from the Arab World, held over two days at the Royal Court
3 www.institutfrancais.com/ Theatre in London, took place a few months after the uprisings, in August 2011.
4 www.digitaltheatre.com/ 7 www.siwa-plateforme.org/FR/perspectives/siwa04-05.html
5 http://seefoundation.org/v2/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1 8 www.yatfund.org
43
changes the deal. Theatres were constructed, so as to give plays in the Nobel Prize for literature to Orhan Pamuk doesn’t seem to have
French or Italian, later translated into Turkish, splitting the public in benefitted Turkish theatre, Virgine Symaniec remarks. And the same
two – those who participate in an elitist culture, attached to Western remark could be made for the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Naguib
aesthetics, and those who have access to popular culture. Mahfouz, who benefited Arab literature but not Egyptian theatre at all.
Several observations can be made with regard to the translation Faced with this rarity observed almost everywhere, one notes
of theatrical works into Turkish. First of all, the percentage of Turk- at the same time the richness of the catalogue of the publish-
ish theatrical works in the bibliographic counts of the mapping is ing house l’Espace d’un instant, linked to the theatre activity of
marginal. That is explained on the one hand by the fact that many the Maison de l’Europe et de l’Orient (Paris) which is part of a
works translated and staged were not published, and on the other broader interest for theatre translation, with the European net-
hand by the fact that “many plays were not translated into Turkish work of theatre translators, Eurodram. This example shows that if
but published in Istanbul in the original language (Shakespeare, the role of translators in the promotion of theatre works that are
George Bernard Shaw, Friedrich Dürrenmatt).” Works of Europe- not or barely accessible is incontestable, that of cultural institu-
an theatre that were diffused or which were promised translation tions, whether public or those of associations, and their artistic
into Turkish nonetheless are exclusively classics”. directors, is just as crucial. In her study of the translation of Turk-
As in Arabic, the passage via an intermediary language for trans- ish into Finnish, Tuula Kojo shows that the mobility of cultural ac-
lation into Turkish is customary for less well-known languages. tors, when it is fed by a real curiosity with regard to unknown ar-
Thus Ibsen’s Peer Gynt was translated in 2006 via German. tistic realities, by a capacity for being surprised, can constitute
Finally, authors whose theatrical works are generally translated an important level in theatre translation and, more broadly, for
in numerous countries, such as Thomas Bernhard, George Bernard the travelling of imaginaries and aesthetics. At this stage in the
Shaw and Eric Emmanuel Schmitt, oddly enough, have for the most process of drawing up landmarks for a future, exhaustive, study
been translated into Turkish with their prose. on theatre translation “between the shores”, it would be equally
interesting to measure what exchanges centred on artists in the
With regard to translation, the mapping has fully emphasised the performing arts in the Balkans – Turkey included – have brought
differences between countries formerly attached to the Ottoman in terms of the circulation of works between languages, in the
Empire and/or Balkan countries having significant Turkophone mi- network IETM (International Experimental Theatre Meeting), for
norities, and the other countries of Central and Eastern Europe. example, at the festival Mladi Levi (Ljubljana), etc. Recent initia-
However, Virginie Symaniec stresses that this numerical differ- tives also deserve to be signalled, such as the network Kadmos
ence doesn’t play in favour of Turkish theatre, for which the only (2008), tool of cooperation between four important festivals of
author translated, often via Russian from the time of the Cold War, the Euro-Mediterranean space.
is Nazim Hikmet. In fact, she remarks that “the quantity of theat-
rical works translated and published since the end of the 1980s Last but not least, the TEDA programme, which supports the trans-
between Turkey and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe lation of Turkish works, includes a significant theatre element and
seems to have shrunk”, in all likelihood for ideological reasons. doubtless opens up points of view for theatre professionals as a
Contrary to what has been observed for the novel, the attribution of whole so as to promote the circulation of Turkish theatre.
PROMOTING A BETTER KNOWLEDGE OF THEATRE TRANSLATION AT THE EURO-MEDITERRANEAN LEVEL

If artistic exchanges, most notably in the domain of the performing arts, are the object of a certain attention in the Euro-
Mediterranean space, the stakes of their translation have never been posed in a collective and systematic manner. This work
deserves to be opened up from two points of view:
 Pinpoint the practices of theatre translation in the Euro-Mediterranean region, in the context of workshops involving pro-
fessionals, and develop and improved understanding of their place in the existing projects of international cooperation. A
particular attention ought to be given to the stakes of linguistic diversity.
 Carry out a systematic mapping of translation involving a plurality of networks and actors. This map necessarily implies a
reflection not only on the text but on the effects of cultural translation on stage and with the public and on the conditions
of reception of a work by the public.
PROMOTE DYNAMICS OF TRANSLATION IN THE THEATRE

 Support existing exchange programmes as well as new initiatives which develop in the direction of an equality of exchang-
es and reciprocal processes of translation.
 Introduce training in theatre translation into university translation programmes and training in translation into institutes
for theatre training.
 Valorise linguistic diversity and the necessity of translating theatre from the most neglected or minoritarian of languages.
FOR A MEMORY OF THEATRE TRANSLATION

 Because of the growing importance of surtitling in theatre representation, it is important for theatres and for institutions
supporting creation in the theatre and its diffusion, to carry out a structured archiving and cataloguing of plays translated
for surtitling which have not been translated.
LIBRARIES
AND TRANSLATION
45
By virtue of the central place that they occupy in knowledge transmission processes, the imaginary, think-
ing and languages, libraries can make a central contribution to the deployment and development of transla-
tion. Based upon the present, they open up the archives of a culture to interactions with those of others. They
awaken a taste for alterity, promote access to a greater number of translated works, valorise the presence of
works in other languages. Inscribed in a territory, where their role in the construction of the common is funda-
mental, they are outlined in the space of universals, because of their initial encyclopaedic mission and their
insertion into globalised networks of access to knowledge. The everyday relation that they have with readers,
from wherever they may come and whatever language they may speak, is henceforth connected to the digital
access to their collections and those of other libraries elsewhere in the world.
For these reasons, since the launching of the project “Translating in the Mediterranean” at the end of 2008
in Marseilles, Transeuropéennes has wanted to set to work on the question of translation in libraries. As a
first stage, Transeuropéennes in partnership with the Institut du monde arabe and the Ministry of Culture and
Communication, opted to explore the terrain in France on the basis of a simple question: “what place do Arab
authors have in French libraries?” Two days of study allowed us to open up a very fruitful space for collective
reflection that should now be extended into other countries in the Euro-Mediterranean region, on the basis of
bigger questions.
Lack of knowledge name of the author in the language of arrival and of departure,
the name of the translator, the language of translation, are often
of the translated works missing. Errors of transcription between different written forms
are common. At the end of 2009, in the context of a day of study
However, it is worth setting out some distinctive features. There on translating the human and social sciences organised by the
isn’t really any acquisition policy for Arab authors, in translation or Institut français du Proche-Orient (IFPO) and Transeuropéennes
in Arabic, in French libraries. The exceptions to this state of affairs in Beirut, Elsa Zakhia, the IFPO librarian gave an account of a
are linked to the personal competences of actors, the capacity of quick survey of the catalogues in the libraries of three universi-
librarians to convince their colleagues and their institutions, less ties in Beirut. Some very interesting information transpired with
frequently to a collective undertaking constructed over time. The regard to the division of knowledge depending on the languages.
percentage of titles purchased compared with the number trans- On the basis of the example of two well-known Lebanese authors
lated works in Arabic published in France annually is low. There is a with books in several languages (Arabic, English, and French),
lack of knowledge about translated Arab production, which explains some written in Arabic, others in French, some translated, oth-
a certain contempt on the part of librarians for the contents of this ers not, she pointed out not just differences in buying policy be-
production – in the domains of religion and society in particular. This tween libraries but also biases in cataloguing that lead to striking
lack of knowledge is largely due to the absence of accounts or criti- variations in results – depending on whether the author’s name
cal reviews of books translated from Arabic in professional journals, was typed in using Latin or Arabic characters.
and to the absence of institutions or associations to valorise these Moreover, problems posed by the Dewey classification, based on
publications. The lack of both means and opportunity for inviting a Western division of knowledges, make indexing and searching
Arab authors reinforces these difficulties. In both areas, the Institut for classical Arab or Ottoman works complex. In the bibliographic
du Monde Arabe seems not to play the role that could be expected data collected by the authors of the studies, the classification of
of it, as much at the French as the European level. an author can vary between “human and social sciences”, “reli-
Developed out on the basis of a precise question related to the Euro- gion”, “philosophy”...
Mediterranean perspectives of the mapping, this reflection on the prac-
tices of librarians nevertheless serves as a melting pot for future net-
working work . It will have to be pursued, amplified, adapted, because The stakes of digitization
the studies undertaken for the mapping project all stress the impor-
tance of reflecting on the diffusion and reception of translated works. The last domain of interest but perhaps the most important in
The studies for the project in any case bring precious information to oth- terms of Euro-Mediterranean cultural cooperation, the digitisation
er aspects of the situation going to the heart of the work of librarians. of the national collections of libraries has not for the time being giv-
en rise to a reflection on the stakes of translation relative to these
processes: What should be the status of translated works, as a part
Bibliographic records, norms, of the heritage? What should be the translation strategies in order
classification to promote access to digitized works? Work will thus be started on
these questions in 2012, in the context of the continued develop-
To start with, and to return to the thorny question of bibliographic ment of the mapping.
data, the bibliographic records of translated books in library cat-
alogues are often patchy, including in the catalogues of numer-
ous national libraries. The original title of the translated work, the
BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORDS FOR THE TRANSLATED BOOK

In each country, a specific effort must be made by librarians with regard to the bibliographic details of translated books,
where and when information is provided by the publisher. The original title of the translated work, the author’s name in both
the language of arrival and departure, the name of the translator and the language of translation should all be mentioned.
THE CONSTITUTION OF COLLECTIONS

At the level of cities or regions, librarians may feel lacking in resources with regard to the choice of books to acquire, taking
into account the lack of information in the professional press and professional organisations. Alliances between librarians,
but also with specialist readers and associations, are necessary. Putting into place diversified acquisition policies (diverse
in terms of authors and source languages) should be encouraged by the controlling bodies of libraries.
MAKE TRANSLATED WORKS MORE ACCESSIBLE

The accessibility of translated works involves their easy legibility in the catalogue, a good location in the library, reader
support. Librarians should be helped in this.
There are very different practices with regard to the separation between translated works and works in the original lan-
guage in library space. They are often the reflection of complex relations to the diversity of societies and their component
parts. A better knowledge of these practices seems desirable.
CONTRIBUTE TO THE COMMON

In the old functions that were devolved to the in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, libraries were places for reading,
translation, disputatio and the formation of knowledges.
In the direction of a sharing broadened out to the greatest number, libraries could contribute to bringing the translated book
out of its enclave, by organising public encounters around authors and their translations, accompanied by translation or
reading workshops in connection with publishers and other institutions.
A STAKE IN THE EURO-MEDITERRANEAN COOPERATION

Aspects of library science, such as reflection on the mission of libraries in the Euro-Mediterranean space call for a reflection
bringing together national, university, municipal libraries, networks and associations of librarians...
At the same time, the work of digitisation of the national collections of libraries is occurring at an accelerated pace, without
the time necessarily having been taken to assess the stakes of translation as it relates to it.
A number of the partners in the mapping project wish to develop work in the direction of these two themes in 2012.
47
CONCLUSION
The mapping reveals the considerable quantitative and qualitative inequalities in exchange, from the point of
view of what is translated, the manner in which one translates or in which what is translated is signalled and
valued within the media, bookshops, libraries. Cultural hegemonies are manifest not only in the prioritisation of
languages and works translated, but in the mechanisms of legitimation of works to be translated, and in the proc-
ess of translation via intermediary languages. History and contemporary geopolitical realities – in the forefront
of which is the Israel/Palestine conflict, visibly influence the interests, infatuation, disinterest and rejections. The
persistence of an orientalist construction of the other, the maintaining of reductive stereotypes and mechanisms
of censorship and self-censorship constitute so many filters through which, across “the shores”, the part of the
other is reduced and brought back to what is known. Finally, processes of economic globalisation and the grow-
ing commercialisation of cultural goods manifestly occur to the profit of a homogenisation around commercial
“lighthouse” products, to the detriment of a real diversity of cultural expressions and their translation. In the same
sense, the absence or the progressive disappearance of high-level university training for languages and cultures
perceived as having the least economic potential entails deficits in knowledge, competences, mediating capaci-
ties and consequently additional areas of ignorance on both sides of the Mediterranean.
The mapping thus questions public policies at the governmental as much as intergovernmental level. The stake
for translation in the Euro-Mediterranean region cannot be summed up by the realities of the market, which, in
the matter of books should, in any case, verify conditions for equitable exchange. To reverse the tendencies is to
give oneself the means to act on the contexts and to come to the help of all those who, as publishers, undertake
the risk of a quality work “between the shores” today. In most of the countries in the Union for the Mediterranean,
quality translations between Arabic, the languages of the EU, Turkish, Hebrew are in general carried by independ-
ent publishers, whether generalist or specialist. In the Arab world, private publishers also play a growing role in
the publication of translated works. Without the help of programmes of support for translation, whether private or
public, these works/labours would be destined to disappear or to precariousness. But this support must respect
the autonomy of publishers, the long term coherence of their choices, the integrity of the original work and its
translation, ensure the respects of the rights and the remuneration of the translator, ensure the quality of the
translation. More generally, new solidarities between programmes of support for publishers and translators must
be invented, which doesn’t take shortcuts on taking the reader into account. Because the question of knowing for
whom one is translating is too rarely posed.
No more is translation separable from the general emancipation of works of the imaginary and of thought with re-
gard to censors and censorship. The map reveals the point to which the thunderbolt of censorship and the weight
of social surveillance bears quite readily on the translator, readily accused of betraying the order of the commu-
nity, or of disloyalty. As numerous intellectuals in the Arab world emphasise, the revolutions and uprisings do not
stop with the democratisation of political institutions, but call for a real cultural emancipation – an emancipation
that the Union for the Mediterranean should facilitate and support, but which it can in no way orient or dictate.
The mapping reveals numerous blind points or things left unthought, in the first rank of which the translation of
the human and social sciences figures, with its numerous stakes: languages of translation and languages of the
production of knowledges, contexts of production and needs for the emancipation of knowledges with regard to
authoritarian regimes and to logics of commodification, the nature of knowledges translated, the conditions of
the diffusion and reception of works translated, etc.
Translation is not only an affair for translators and publishers. It is a stake for the entirety of society, equal to the
challenges posed by the diversity of cultural expressions and their interlacing – by the movements of migration,
new media, multiple frontier crossings, liberation movements. The fertile role of immigrant intellectuals in devel-
oping knowledge and understanding, where they are, of other languages, other representations of the world, other
interpretations of the real, must be praised. Similarly, the travelling of students in the period of their studies, their
welcoming and integration into the social fabric and into the fabric of research, are so many promises for fruitful
links on their return. A whole generation of great Arabic translators was thus formed in the years between 1960
and 1980. But today, the younger generation can no longer obtain grants, nor visas (or can only obtain them in
dribs and drabs), and are not in a position to ensure that succession. In this time of short term thinking about visa
policies, particularly in the European Union, this fact deserves to be underlined.
It is common today to speak of the mobility of cultural actors. In the light of the mapping, but also for the inscrip-
tion in a longer memory of translation in the Mediterranean, we will speak more readily of travel, because this word
speaks not only of physical but of mental displacement, and inscribes it in a longer and more reflexive temporal-
ity than mobility. Translators, but also publishers of books and/or journals, or even bookshops, librarians, haven’t
benefited from much attention in this regard. To travel, to reside, to have the possibility of studying at university,
but also – throughout one’s life – to encounter others and to reflect together so as to imagine common projects:
the actors in translation have as much need of such possibilities as do artists or other cultural operators. And in
the last resort, the reader is the beneficiary.
One could quite rightly reply to the observation about inequalities and of the deficit of relation that the present
mapping states, that the processes of translation have always been intrinsically unequal, the reflection of stakes
of power and domination. Published in the wake of 11th September and in the year of the starting of the Gulf War in
Iraq, the report of the UNDP in 2003 on the knowledge society in the Arab world underlines the small quantity of
works translated in the Arab world and the delay accumulated in the production and diffusion of knowledges. It was
amply instrumentalised so as to stigmatise an Arab-Muslim world lacking translation, self-enclosed, in opposition
to the West (which would be the translator with the curiosity about the other). Since then, Richard Jacquemond 1
has shown that this report, which created a lot of fuss, relied on incomplete and unreliable data and a question-
able method. And the ensemble of the mapping studies confirms that reality is noticeably different from the land-
scape painted by the UNDP. More recently, it is the role and the share of Arabic translations of Greek works in the
Mediaeval West which was called into question 2, reduced to a meagre living, bringing a collection of well-known
researchers to refute the theses thus advanced and to denounce what Irène Rosier-Catach, Marwan Rashed, Alain
de Libera and Philippe Büttgen summarised 3 as follows: “the novelty is this: Islam has become a stake in contro-
versies that are inseparably political and erudite. Islamophobia has become scholarly.”
In counterpoint to the intrinsically unequal nature of the processes of translation, it will be objected that, echoing
the recommendations following from the map, highpoints in the Euro-Mediterranean space are associated with a
thinking and a politics of translation that privileges the travelling of ideas, of imaginaries and of people, and the
welcoming of people and knowledges of other language-worlds. Some of these moments serve as seamarks for a
future navigation between the shores: the Alexandria of the Library and the Septuagint Bible, the Abbasid epoch of
the Houses of Wisdom, with the celebrated Beit Al Hikma 4 in Baghdad, where Greek, Persian, Indian and even Chi-
nese knowledges were collected, translated and discussed, the Palermo of the Norman kingdom of Sicily, where
Arab scholars were received and translated, the Toledo of the emblematic School of translators from the 13th cen-
tury, whose translations of Arab and Hebrew into Latin constituted a turning for knowledges in Europe, the Cairo
of Nahda, the movement of the Arab renaissance which rested notably on the creation of a school for translation
and a policy of the diffusion of works, the flourishing Beirut of the 1960s, with the dawning of a very dense intel-
lectual, literary and artistic production, including translation. Yet other landmarks could be cited, it being a matter
of nourishing a long memory and a history of translations and interculturalities in the Euro-Mediterranean space
– fine work for the future.
Today, running counter to the prevailing tendency in the globalisation of exchanges, it is thus the very meaning of
language as a relation to the world and of translation as a mode of relation to alterities that needs to be brought to
the fore. Because it would be wrong to think that the fact of speaking just one foreign language more or less well
is enough to be understood. The polyphony of languages is also the polyphony of the mysteries that they consti-
tute for one another. The confrontation with the untranslatable, which philosopher Barbara Cassin writes is “what
one doesn’t stop (not) translating” 5 and thus is an invitation to translate more, paradoxically rejoins the choice
of filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard or Jim Jarmusch to allow so-called foreign languages to be heard in their
films – in other words, to put to the test of strangeness, if only to give birth to an insatiable need for translation,
an insatiable desire of/for the other.
1 Richard Jacquemond ‘Les Arabes et la traduction : petite déconstruction d’une idée reçue’, La pensée de midi 2/2007 (N° 21), p. 177-184.
2 Sylvain Gouguenheim Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel. Les raciness grecques de l’Europe chrétienne, Paris, Seuil, 2008.
3 Irène Rosier-Catach, Marwan Rashed, Alain de Libera and Philippe Büttgen Les Grecs, les Arabes, et nous Paris, Fayard, 2009. See also http://www.transeuropeennes.
eu/en/articles/114
4 Destroyed in 2003 by coalition bombing during the American-led invasion of Iraq.
5 Barbara Cassin, Introduction to Vocabulaire européen des philosophies Paris, Seuil/Le Robert, 2004 (p.xvii).
49
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1.............................................................................................................................................................................13
Works translated from Arabic, distributed by languages
Figure 2.............................................................................................................................................................................14
Number of books translated from Turkish in the last 20-25 years
Figure 3.............................................................................................................................................................................14
Number of books translated from Hebrew into 5 languages between 1995 and 2010
Figure 4.............................................................................................................................................................................16
Estimate of the percentage of books translated from English and French into Arabic between 1990 and 2010
Figure 5.............................................................................................................................................................................16
Translations into Arabic distributed by language and type of work
Figure 6.............................................................................................................................................................................17
Translations into Turkish between 1987 and 2010
Figure 7 ............................................................................................................................................................................17
Translations into Hebrew between 1985 and 2010
Figure 8.............................................................................................................................................................................37
Evolution of the translations into Arabic in the field of human and social sciences between 1990 and 2009
Figure 9.............................................................................................................................................................................37
Distribution of the translations into Arabic in the field on human and social sciences, by language (2000-2009)
Figure 10. .........................................................................................................................................................................38

Distribution (in percentages) of the human and social sciences translations into Arabic, by field (2000-2009)
APPENDICES
1. Overviews
• Translation to and from Arabic: Richard JACQUEMOND, literary translator and professor of modern Arab literature
(Transeuropéennes, Paris and The Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria).
• Translation to and from Hebrew: Yaël LERER, founder of the publishing house Al Andalus and author
(Transeuropéennes, Paris).
• Translation to and from Turkish: Hakan ÖZKAN, translator and researcher in Arab literature and Greek dialectology
• Translation and publishing in the Arab world: Franck MERMIER, director of research at the CNRS, (Transeuropéennes,
Paris and The Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria).
• The socio-economic status of the literary translator in the Euro-Mediterranean region: Martin DE HAAN, literary
translator and president of the CEATL (Transeuropéennes and the French Ministry of Culture, Paris).
• Translating literature: Ghislaine GLASSON DESCHAUMES, director of Transeuropéennes and researcher,
• Translating the human and social sciences: Ghislaine GLASSON DESCHAUMES, director of Transeuropéennes and
researcher, (Transeuropéennes, Paris and The Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria).
• Translating theatre: Ghislaine GLASSON DESCHAUMES, director of Transeuropéennes and researcher,
• Libraries and translation: Ghislaine GLASSON DESCHAUMES, director of Transeuropéennes and researcher
2. Transversal Studies
• Arabic translation of the human and social sciences: Hasnaa DESSA, student in cultural management and
Mohamed-Sghir JANJAR, assistant director of the King Abdul-Aziz Foundation
(Transeuropéennes, Paris, The Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria and the King Abdul-Aziz Foundation for Islamic
Studies and Human Sciences, Casablanca).
• Translation of young people’s literature in the Mediterranean region:
Mathilde CHÈVRE, doctoral student in young people’s literature in Arab countries, author and editorial director
• The place of the works of Arab theatre in French libraries: Mountajab SAKR, specialist of contemporary Arab theatre
• The status of the translator in Turkey: the Turkish Association of Literary Translators ÇEVBIR (Transeuropéennes,
Paris, The Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria and the Turkish Association of Literary Translators ÇEVBIR, Istanbul).
• Translation in Algeria: Lazhari LABTER, publisher
• Translation in Tunisia: Jalel AL-GHARBI, author, poet and literary translator
• Theatre translation to and from Arabic: Jumana AL-YASIRI, independent cultural counsellor and author
• Theatre translation to and from Turkish: Virginie SYMANIEC, PhD in Theatre Studies and specialist in Bielorussian
Drama (Transeuropéennes, Paris and The Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria).
51
3. Studies by Pairs of Languages

From Arabic
• Into Italian: Mariangela MASULLO, teacher of Arabic language and literature
(Transeuropéennes, Paris, The Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria and l’Università Orientale, Naples).
• Into French: Emmanuel VARLET, literary translator
• Into the four languages of Spain: Ana Belén DÍAZ GARCÍA, researcher and
Bachir MAHYUB RAYAA, researcher and interpreter
(Transeuropéennes, Paris, The Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria and the Escuela de Traductores de Toledo, Toledo).
• Into Bosnian: Amina ISAMOVIĆ and Mirnes DURANOVIĆ, literary translators
(Transeuropéennes, Paris, The Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria and Next Page Foundation, Sofia).
• Into Bulgarian: Nedelya KITAEVA, literary translator
• Into Croatian: Tatjana PAIĆ-VUKIĆ, literary translator
• Into Czech: Barbora ČERNÁ, Charles University (Prague) and Štěpán MACHÁČEK, professor at the University of Ain
Shams (Cairo) (Transeuropéennes, Paris, the Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria and Next Page Foundation, Sofia).
• Into Lithuanian: Oleg VOLKOV, Vilnius University (Lithuania),
• Into Macedonian: Teon DZINGO, the Institute of National History of the University of Saints ”Cyril et Methodius”
(Skopje) (Transeuropéennes, Paris, The Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria and Next Page Foundation, Sofia).
• Into Polish: Marcin MICHALSKI, literary translator
• Into Romanian: Anamaria ALEXANDRU, Dodită ANDRA-RAMONA, Ionită ROXANA-IOANA, Lixandru MONICA-ALINA, under
the supervision of Laura Mariana SITARU, the University of Bucharest
• Into Serb: Dragana DJORDJEVIC, literary translator
• Into Slovakian: Marek BRIEŠKA, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Slovakia
• Into Slovenian: Barbara SKUBIC, literary translator
• Into English (literature only): Alexandra BÜCHLER, director of Literature Across Frontiers and Alice GUTHRIE, literary
translator (Transeuropéennes, Paris, The Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria and Literature Across Frontiers,
Aberystwyth).
• Into German: Mona NAGGAR, journalist and publisher
(Transeuropéennes, Paris, The Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria).
• Into Finnish: Maria PAKKALA, literary translator
• Into Portuguese: Catarina BELO, professor of philosophy at the American University of Cairo and translator
Into Arabic
• From French, in Egypt and the Machreq: Emmanuel VARLET, literary translator
• From English (literature only): Sameh Fekry HANNA, lecturer in Translation Studies and Arabic in Salford University
• From Italian: Chiara DIANA, doctoral student in the social history of Egypt
(Transeuropéennes, Paris, The Anna Lindh • Foundation, Alexandria and the Università Orientale, Naples).
• From the languages of the EU and from Turkish in the Gulf States: Ali HAJJI, doctoral candidate in the sciences of
language (Transeuropéennes, Paris).
• From the languages of the EU and from Turkish in the countries of the Maghreb: Sarra GHORBAL,
Masters in Book Publishing (Transeuropéennes, Paris and the Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria).
• From the four languages of Spain: Ana Belén DÍAZ GARCÍA, researcher and Bachir MAHYUB RAYAA, researcher and interpreter
• From the languages of Eastern Europe: Next Page Foundation

• From Dutch: Djûke POPPINGA, literary translator
• From German: Mona NAGGAR, journalist and publisher
• From Finnish: Maria PAKKALA, literary translator
• From Portuguese: Catarina BELO, professor of philosophy at the American University of Cairo and translator
From Turkish
• Into Italian: Lea NOCERA, teacher of Turkish language and literature
(Transeuropéennes, Paris, The Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria and the Università Orientale, Naples).
• Into French: Nil DENIZ, artistic and cultural project manager
• Into Spanish: Rafael CARPINTERO ORTEGA, literary translator
• Into Czech: Petr KUČERA, literary translator and professor at Charles University (Prague)
• Into Bulgarian: Aziz Nazmi ŞAKIR-TAŞ, literary translator
• Into Croatian: Neven UŠUMOVIĆ University of Zagreb and Ekrem ČAUŠEVIĆ, professor
• Into Lithuanian: Justina PILKAUSKAITĖ KARINIAUSKIENĖ, Vilnius University (Lithuania)
• Into Macedonian: Dragan ZAJKOVSKI, the Institute of National History, University of Saints ”Cyril et Methodius”
(Skopje) (Transeuropéennes, Paris, The Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria and Next Page Foundation, Sofia).
• Into Polish: Magdalena JODŁOWSKA-EBO, University of Jagiellonian (Cracow)
• Into Serb: Mirjana MARINKOVIĆ, University of Belgrade
• Into Slovakian: Gabriel PIRICKÝ, Slovakian Academy of Sciences (Bratislava)
• Into Bosnian: Amina ISANOVIĆ and Mirnes DURANOVIĆ, literary translators
• Into Greek: Hakan ÖZKAN, translator and researcher in Arab literature and Greek dialectology
• Into German: Hakan ÖZKAN, translator and researcher in Arab literature and Greek dialectology
• Into Finnish: Tuula KOJO, literary translator
• Into Danish: Wolfgang SCHARLIPP, literary translator
• Into Swedish: Elżbieta ŚWIĘCICKA, teacher of Turkish language and literature
• Into English in Great Britain and Ireland (literature only):
Duygu TEKGÜL, doctoral student in sociology and specialist in literary translation
(Transeuropéennes, Paris, The Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria, and Literature Across Frontiers, Aberystwyth).
Into Turkish
• From the languages of the EU: Zeyno PEKUNLU, doctoral student in cultural studies
• From Arabic (literature only): Hakan ÖZKAN, translator and researcher in Arab literature and Greek dialectology
53
• From Greek: Hakan ÖZKAN, translator and researcher in Arab literature and Greek dialectology
• From Swedish: Annika SVAHNSTRÖM, literary translator
From Hebrew
• Into the four languages of Spain: Beatriz GONZÁLEZ GONZÁLEZ, researcher
• Into English in Great Britain and Ireland (literature only): Jasmine DONAHAYE, author
(Transeuropéennes, Paris, The Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria and Literature Across Frontiers, Aberystwyth).
• Into Dutch: Ran HACOHEN, literary translator and academic
(Transeuropéennes, Paris and the Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria).
Into Hebrew
• From the languages of the EU, Arabic and Turkish: Yaël LERER, founder of the publishing house Al Andalus and author
• From the four languages of Spain into Hebrew: Beatriz GONZÁLEZ GONZÁLEZ, researcher
• From Dutch: Ran HACOHEN, literary translator and academic
(Transeuropéennes, Paris and the Anna Lindh Foundation, Alexandria).
Transeuropéennes warmly thanks
all the authors whose studies
and syntheses have contributed to the mapping
for their participation and involvement in the project, the members of

“Translating in the Mediterranean” network:
Raed Bader Birzeit University, Ali Ben Makhlouf philosopher, Omar Berrada writer
and translator, Bernard Botiveau IREMAM, Barbara Cassin philosopher, Luis Miguel Perez
Cañada Escuela de Traductores de Toledo, Abdessalam Cheddadi University Institute for
Scientific Research (Rabat), Francesca Corrao Università Orientale, Rami Daher, architect
and urban planner, Maria Donzelli Centre for studies on the Mediterranean cultures,
Yana Genova The Next Page Foundation, Gamal Al Ghitani writer, Yves Gonzalez-Quijano
Institut français du Proche-Orient, Gérald Grunberg National Library of France, Martin
de Haan European Council of Literary Translators’ Association, Mahmoud Abu Hashhash
Qattan Foundation, Sofiane Hadjadj Barzakh publishing house, Richard Jacquemond
University of Aix-Marseille, Ferda Keskin Bilgi University, Driss Khrouz National Library of
Morocco, Tahar Labib Arab Organization for translation, Yael Lerer Al Andalus publishing
house, Mohamed-Sghir Janjar King Abdul-Aziz Foundation Casablanca, Mustapha
Laarissa University of Marrakech, Elizabeth Longuenesse Institut français du Proche-
Orient, Franck Mermier Laboratory of Urban Anthropology /IIAC, Margaret Obank Banipal,
Hakan Özkan researcher and translator, Hans Schiler Hans Schiler Verlag, Müge Gürsoy
Sökmen Metis Publishing, Françoise Wuilmart Centre européen de traduction littéraire.
for their advice and contributions:

Fethi Benslama, Frank Berberich, Humphrey Davies, Marie Elias, Iman Farag,
Sarra Ghorbal, Khaled Al Maaly, Philippe Le Moine, Abderrahman Rachik,
Fayez Suyyagh, Carlos Toner, Emmanuel Varlet
for their help in collecting the bibliographic data:

Marius Tukaj Index Translationum / UNESCO
Ute Reimer Goethe Institut Cairo, Hasmig Chahinian La Joie par les livres
Dominique Bergouignan, Anne-Elisabeth Buxtorf, Roselyne Déry, Institut français
Tomasz Pindel Polish Institute for the Book, Katarina Bednarova Association
of Slovak translators, Jürgen Jakob Becker Literarisches Colloquium
for their confidence, their support and involvement:

Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the dialogue between Cultures
André Azoulay, President
Andreu Claret, Executive Director
Gemma Aubarell, Program Director
and Chaymaa Ramzy, responsible for multi-annual programs
Ministry of Culture and Communication (France)
Jean-Francois Chaintreau, Chief of the Coordination of cultural policies and cultural
innovation service, General Secretariat
Xavier North, General Delegate to the French language and the languages of France
Brigitte Favarel, Deputy Director of European and international affairs
Helen Hatzfeld, Department of Research, Higher Education and Technology
Institut français
Paul de Sinety, director of the book and promotion of knowledge department
as well as
Alain Le Roy and Serge Telle, Ambassadors in charge successively of the Union
for the Mediterranean
Michele Gendreau-Massalou, President and Honorary State Councilor
A publication of Transeuropéennes, international journal of critical thought.
Published by: Assemblée transeuropéenne pour traduire entre les cultures
132, rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis F-75010 Paris
contact@transeuropeennes.eu
www.transeuropeennes.eu
A project conducted by Transeuropéennes

and the Anna Lindh Foundation
for the Dialogue between Cultures
© Transeuropéennes and The Anna Lindh Foundation - April 2012 - Design by: Priska Vigo - www.ekarlate.com
with:
Not for sale

ISSN 2105-0813
ISBN 978-2-912002-26-6

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A MAPPING OF TRANSLATION

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A project carried out by Transeuropéennes

Conclusions and Recommendations

Direction of the project:

1. WHAT BIBLIOGRAPHIC AND STATISTICAL DATA?...................................................... 10

3. PUBLISHERS AND BOOKSHOPS AND THE CHALLENGE OF TRANSLATION..... 22

The mapping: who? how?

The areas covered

Studies and their authors: a breeding ground

The project tool-box

The social network Translating in the Mediterranean

FOR BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA

FOR STATISTICAL DATA

FOR A EURO-MEDITERRANEAN OBSERVATORY ON TRANSLATION:

Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew:

Lit lian 85-2 )

Slo ian ( 0-2

Literature Religion Human and Social Sciences Other

more specifically by the works of contemporary authors. In the

800 Figure 2. Number of books translated from Turk-

n From Hebrew Figure 3. Number of books translated from Hebrew

German Dutch French Four languages of Spain Polish

Into Arabic, Turkish and Hebrew:

Literature and theater Human and Social Sciences Other

Lit lian 85-2 )

Slo ian ( 0-2

Literature Religion Human and Social Sciences Others

Dominant Languages/Subaltern Languages

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Contexts, memories, frontiers

FOR A EURO-MEDITERRANEAN TRANSLATION PROGRAMME

FOR RENEWED NATIONAL APPROACHES

TAKING THE CHAIN OF TRANSLATION INTO ACCOUNT

ALLIANCES, COMPLEMENTARITIES AND SOLIDARITIES

STIMULATING AND PROMOTING JOINT PUBLISHING

PRIVILEGE INFORMATION, CONSULTATION AND COOPERATION “BETWEEN THE SHORES”

SUPPORT THE TRANSLATION AND DIFFUSION OF TRANSLATED WORKS

THE TRANSLATOR IS AN AUTHOR

IMPROVE THE STATUS AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONDITION OF LITERARY TRANSLATORS

The training of literary translators

SUPPORT ORGANISATIONS OF LITERARY TRANSLATORS

TRAIN LITERARY TRANSLATORS

If not the novel, nothing!

DIVERSIFY POINTS OF VIEW AND PROPOSITIONS

FREEDOM FROM STEREOTYPES

ENCOURAGE LITERARY EXCHANGES IN ALL THEIR DIVERSITY

PROGRAMMES OF SUPPORT FOR TRANSLATION

THE QUALITY OF TRANSLATIONS

In his introduction to the important study carried out by the King

THE HUMAN AND SOCIAL SCIENCES: A STAKE FOR EURO-MEDITERRANEAN COOPERATION

SUPPORT THE EMERGENCE OF NEW FORMS OF COOPERATION

PROPOSE THROUGH CONSULTATION, CHOOSE THROUGH CONSULTATION

CREATING THE CONDITIONS FOR THE RECEPTION OF TRANSLATED WORK

FURTHERING THE TRAINING AND MOBILITY OF AND ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN TRANSLATORS

The major role played by Meeting Points must be underlined here

PROMOTING A BETTER KNOWLEDGE OF THEATRE TRANSLATION AT THE EURO-MEDITERRANEAN LEVEL

PROMOTE DYNAMICS OF TRANSLATION IN THE THEATRE

FOR A MEMORY OF THEATRE TRANSLATION

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