Translation and Anxiety about Self-Image and Identity in the Arab World

Abstract

Arab intellectuals and practitioners of translation in the age of globalization are exerting strenuous efforts to initiate an organized large-scale translation activity from Arabic into foreign languages and vice versa, activity inspired by the sweeping force of cross- cultural interaction and communication in the age of globalization. In addition to its traditional role as a means of promoting cross culture communication and transmitting knowledge and information, translation, particularly from Arabic into foreign languages at the present time in the Arab World is conceived as an effective medium to project a genuine or authentic image of Arabs culture. That is in an attempt to rectify growing misrepresentations of Arab culture and their image especially in the West in the aftermath of the tragic event of the eleventh of September. It is often maintained that translation of the Arab culture production into English has always tended to confirm pre-existing Western prejudice based mainly on orientalist assumptions about the orient in general and the Arab World in particular. Another important claim is that foreign (mainly western translators) from Arabic into English usually produce manipulated target language texts which reflect ideological moral or aesthetic values privileged in the West, thus acting in violation of the moral values and indigenous thoughts presented in the source language text. The most flagrant examples of such manipulations can be found in translations of Arabic literary works dealing with feminist themes. The paper examines specific examples of the two claims that translation is used as means of manipulations leading to representation of distorted images of the Arab culture and identity. The paper also discusses views on how to control translation activity in the Arab World to serve Arab aspirations for better representation in Western discourse liberated from ethnocentricity, pre- existing prejudices, and from what Andre Lefevere describes as the "dictates" of the "patrons" of translation. One of the striking aspects of the new American social-science attention to the Orient is its singular avoidance of literature. You can read through reams of expert writing on the modern Near East and never encounter a single reference to literature. What seem to matter far more to the regional expert are "facts" of which a literary text is perhaps a disturber. The net effect of this remarkable omission in modern American awareness of the Arab or Islamic Orient is to keep the region and its people conceptually emasculated, reduced to "attitudes" "trends", statistics: in short, dehumanized. Since an Arab poet or novelist- and there are many- writes of his humanity (however strange that may be), he effectively disrupts the various patterns (images, clichés, abstractions) by which the Orient is represented. A literary text speaks more or less directly of a living reality (Said 1978:291)..