Address of Zaki Nusseibeh to the Third International Translation Conference UAE National Library and Archives

Abu Dhabi March 8th, 2023

Esteemed Professors, Colleagues and Honourable Guests.

It is my great honour to address you within the proceedings of this third International Translation Conference here at The UAE National Library and Archives.?

In 1968 the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan founded the then ‘Documents and Research Bureau’ with the objectives of collecting documents and information relating to the history and culture of the Arabian Peninsula and the UAE. The NLA sources its documents within the region and across the world and is entrusted with their archiving and translation. Its active program of oral history secures, as treasures, the life experiences of the Emirati population and their role in, and observations on, the development of the nation. The NLA therefore has a civilizing role, preserving the UAE’s heritage and culture for the nation, and enabling its communication to the world. This fosters international partnerships and builds cultural understanding and reciprocity.

The NLA has pioneering status as one of the oldest cultural institutions in the UAE, and the sixth largest national archive in the world. It serves as an engine of intellectual exploration of our heritage, of the methodologies of history, and of the science and artistry of translation.?

Ladies and gentlemen

At this conference you will help advance this ‘artistry and science of translation’ across its many areas of specialism.?

It is a joy to stand before you today and to offer a small contribution from the point of view of a fellow traveler.??As many of you may be aware, for almost four decades, I served as the personal interpreter and translator for Sheikh Zayed. It was a moving and awe-inspiring experience, one that has taught me a great deal about many things in my life, amongst them the needs and pitfalls of translation, both instantaneous and written.

So, if you permit me, I would like first to discuss the artistry and science of translation as I understand it, before offering some observations on my approach to translation in my professional career.

Yet, rather than a ‘profession’, I like to think of translation as a vocation. It is a calling, inspired by a fundamental love of language, literature, communication, and culture. It is a passion for rhetoric and the written form. It involves being immersed by words and consumed by the craft of meaning.??No one will read an author’s work like a translator. No reader, critic, journalist, or jury will ever spend so much time poring over the phrases that were chosen to lay out in just this way. The work of a translator is to inhabit, and then to be inhabited by, the words.

Translation is also a fundamental part of what makes us human.?

We know that translation is a vital component of what the German philosopher Edmund Husserl called our ‘Lebenswelt’, or life world. It is the method of human sensemaking, how we see and interpret the world. Language itself, the foundation block of human civilization, requires constant translation, a process whereby we can transform concepts in our minds into the uttered words of our language.

In 1660, the Port Royal Abbey Grammarians said of language that it is “this marvelous invention of composing out of twenty-five or thirty sounds that infinite variety of expressions which, while having in themselves no likeness to what is?in our mind, allow us to disclose to?others its whole secret, and to make known to those who cannot penetrate it all that we imagine, and all the various stirrings of our soul”.

So, what is, in my view, the artistry of the vocation of translation?

I sometimes think of translation as the art of co-creation. It is a work requiring two authors: one, the original who invented the shape and the narrative, and the second who made it?singin a?new?tongue. Yet knowing two languages does not make you a translator, any more than having ten fingers makes you a concert pianist. Anyone can be helped by dictionaries, but not everyone can make a text sing in a second language. Translation is a deeply creative act. The satisfaction of accomplishment is poetic, aesthetic: the joy of finding words that convey what was written in the original and sit pleasingly side by side.

And what is the objective of the vocation of translation?

Translation, I believe, has the objective of becoming an invisible bond between people who do not share the same language – whether the author and the reader, or the speaker and the listener.

Yet how frustrating! Who wants a job of which the best that can be said is, ‘If you do it well enough, it renders you invisible’? Worse, who wants to run the risk of being targeted with the accusation, ‘The translator is a traitor!’?

Traduttore, traditore! This Italian expression begs the question of whom the translator is betraying. Is it the reader, deprived of the experience of the original text???Or is it the author, if the translation veers to far from the original text??

How can we best understand this dilemma?

Since all languages are different, their translation brings their semantic and syntactic differences to the surface. A translator must balance literal translation with translating for meaning. The translator must achieve fluency in the target language yet allow the reader to?access and understand the significance of the deliberate word choices of the author.??This balancing act is an impossible task.?

The dilemma was evident in the rich translation tradition of the Arab world. This created the great centre of translation in Baghdad in the Abbasid period. Focused on the translation into Arabic of Greek scientific and philosophical material, often with Syriac as an intermediary language, the tradition followed two templates.?

The first method, associated with Yuhanna Ibn al Batriq and Ibn Na’ima al Himsi, was highly ideal. First, each Greek word would be translated with an equivalent Arabic word. Second, where no equivalent existed, the original Greek word would be borrowed into Arabic.?The second method, associated with Ibn Ishak and Al Jawahari, consisted of translating sense-to-sense. The objective was to create fluent texts in the target language which conveyed the meaning of the original.

The Germans, always precise in defining meaning, differentiate between two sets of people in our vocation: Dolmetchers – those who interpret – and übersetzer – those who translate. Often our work may require shifting from one mode to the other.

So Ladies and gentlemen. Our vocation is an imperfect one.

The inevitability of imperfections in translation is testament to the artistry which the task of translation demands. The conclusion that it is impossible to arrive at a ‘perfect’ definitive translation also implies that the translator can never be entirely invisible and will always leave their mark on their work.?

I find three reasons to celebrate this.?

First, it is a signal that foreign languages are not mutually intelligible and available to linear translation against a universal template. Second, because it is testament to the historical and cultural richness of our world in which each language is unique to the context in which it evolved and gives expression to.?

The third reason for celebration lies in the response to a dilemma posed by the Serbian-American poet and fifteenth US Poet Laureate Charles Simic. He said[1] ?, “The genius and character of people are contained in the language they speak; imagination is rooted in language, geography, and culture of a land; and no two languages share identical context”. He called translation into question, asking, “Can one translate a culture, its world view, its metaphysics?” Yet his answer bestows on the translator a higher vocation. He said, “Every culture in the world is enriched by another country’s literature. Translators were the first multi-culturalists, looking at other languages and other traditions and finding something that they wanted to translate and share.”

My friend the Emirati poet Ghanem Shihab, is a translator in this vein. He is a first-class translator of poetry and prose into both directions, Arabic and English. He has recently translated fifty Arab poems into English, and he has translated Shakespeare’s sonnets into Arabic.?

Yet the translation of poetry is a feat many consider impossible. We are all familiar with the remark, made by the twentieth century American poet Robert Lee Frost, that “Poetry is what is lost in?translation. It is?also?what is lost in?interpretation”.

And way before Frost’s time, in the Baghdad of the eighth century, the Abbasid author and poet Al Jahez wrote, “The virtue of poetry is invested only in the Arabs and in those who speak their language. Poetry cannot be translated and should never be transformed into a different tongue. When translated its structure is arbitrarily disrupted, its rhythm is broken, its dazzle is blunted, and it becomes as prosaic prose”.

Ladies and gentlemen. The vocation of a translator is an unenviable one.

The Russian American novelist, poet, and translator Vladimir Nabokov described three grades of evil in the work of the ‘treacherous’ translator. The first ‘step to Hell’ is when the translator makes obvious errors due to ignorance or a blindness to the obvious. The second step to Hell is when the translator omits to translate passages that either he does not understand or which he considers offensive. The third step to Hell, which Nabokov likens to a punishable crime, is when the translator shapes the original text so that it fits with the fashions he believes expected by the public.?

He takes an equally dim view of translators who are either too lacking in imagination of style, or translators who consider themselves poets. The poet is likely to “drown the foreign masterpiece under the sparkling ripples of his own personal style. Instead of dressing up like the real author, he dresses up the author as himself”.

Nabokov sets out three requirements of the effective translator. First, to possess talent equal to or compatible with the original author. Second to have thorough knowledge of the two nations and the two languages involved. The translator must be familiar with the social background of words, their fashions, history, and period associations. Third, to have detailed knowledge of the author’s manner and methods. The translator must possess the gift of mimicry and be able to act the real author’s part by impersonating his tricks of demeanor and speech, his ways, and his mind, with the utmost degree of verisimilitude.

This is a view shared, for different reasons, by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur explained that to move through life is to live in a world that requires translation. He believed that translators should develop deep familiarity with the culture of the target language, because any text is an expression of the language community’s unique way of perceiving the world. Music is, in Ricoeur’s sense, a further act of sensemaking and expression of culture. I could also speak of art in this way.

Ladies and gentlemen. Speaking of music brings me to some observations on my approach to these challenges during my work with Sheikh Zayed.

I credit my love for music, particularly opera, for my motivation to learn languages. But I also credit Sheikh Zayed for pushing me to pursue my linguistic passion and learn more languages so that I could translate for him. Languages gave me access to the world and its cultural diversity.

When I began my interpreting career, I took part in many meetings of different levels. These involved a variety of interlocutors discussing different subjects that could range from formal diplomacy and high politics to the arcane minutiae of falcon hunting. I had to prepare for all sorts of contingencies and moods, and to study the topical themes that were the preoccupation of world leaders. My interlocutors spoke diverse languages and came from a wide range of different cultural horizons. My translations were often oral and instantaneous, though I did my fair share of text translations, both political and literary.

Interpreting for a head of state in a public arena, and translating his political writings for publication, are different pro cesses. The first requires great attention to the rhetorical form. The second may require greater linguistic exactitude. Exactly where you place the balance between word and meaning comes with experience and judgement. Yet this is a question I have not been able to resolve definitively one way or the other. And it requires the complete confidence and trust of the public figure you are interpreting.

For example, when translating the rich oratory of Sheikh Zayed I often thought of Cicero’s dictum on the translation of the speeches of Aeschines and Demosthenes. He wrote, “And I did not translate them as an interpreter, but as an orator, keeping the same ideas and figures of thought that conform to our usage. And in so doing, I did not hold it necessary to render word for word, but I preserved the general style and force of the language”.

Over time I tended towards a pragmatic, functional approach to translation. I adopted the view of those who argue that there are no absolute standards of translation quality, but only more or less appropriate translations for the purpose for which they are intended. An important element of appropriateness is whether they are understood by the audience in line with their intended purposes.?

Ladies and Gentlemen. In conclusion, I would like to turn my attention to your own agenda.

The topics you will address at this conference speak to the depths and breadths of the challenges faced by translators and interpreters. They range greater detail and problematics than the form/meaning dilemma I have outlined and to which I have offered my pragmatic conclusion. They speak to the importance of translators in civilizing our society.?

Your topics demonstrate how translators strengthen our cultural diversity, making available to the world public the wealth of world literature. Translators enable Arab knowledge to travel beyond our shores. Translators attend to the communication needs of people with special needs – supporting their determination to interact with the linguistic world. You, as Arab translators are specialists in different disciplines, employing different methodologies to make expertise authored in foreign languages available to us here locally.?

Today, the translation community has access to new technological tools, yet you address the dilemmas that these present and how they can be false friends. I hope I have pointed out some of the reasons why Artificial Intelligence will have a long distance to cover before it can become truly attuned, if ever, to the intricacies and nuances of co-authoring worthy translations.

Finally, but fundamentally you will discuss how to train the next generation of translators – a community that will need to be schooled across all these matters and more.

I offer you my thanks for your participation and contributions to this important event. It is one close to my heart and passions, and I wish you every success.

[1] ?https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0806/poet.html