The Fourth International Conference on (The Role of Translation in the Dialogue of Civilizations)

تتصف الأساليب الحديثة في تدريس اللغة الروسية للأجانب بالبحث عن وسائل وطرق للتعليم، ومن شأنه أن يضمن معرفة جيدة من جميع أقسام اللغة الروسية، والتي على أساسها يمكن تكوين مهارات عملية. والقيمة الرئيسة لهذا المشروع هو إنشاء نظام للعمل على الجمل المركبة مع الطلبة الأجانب. ولغاية الآن هذه الإشكالية مدروسة قليلا، وتتطلب المزيد من العمل، وهذا ما يفسر أهمية هذا المشروع. وخلال العمل على هذا المشروع فقد وضع الباحث عدة اهداف: وهو تحديد القيمة النحوية في تعلم اللغة الروسية كلغة أجنبية، وضع نظام للعمل على الجمل المركبة، وكذلك وضع مجموعة من التمارين التي من شانها أن تكون فعالة بشكل خاص عند العمل على الجمل المركبة مع الطلبة الأجانب، وتعليم الطلبة الأجانب استخدام الجمل المركبة في الحديث. ويحتل العمل على الجمل المركبة في تعليم اللغة مكانة مميزة، على الأسس النحوية يتم استيعاب الموروفولوجيا والمفردات وعلم الصوتيات والهجاء.

Within the larger movement of translation into French of modern Arabic literature, Palestinian literature occupies a particular place, one that has obviously more to do with political rather than literary reasons. If it can be argued that the general movement of Arabic translation into French - as well as other - languages has been influenced, whether positively or (more often) negatively, by the political relationship between France and the modern Arab world, this has been especially the case with the Palestinian literary output. This paper will follow the history of its translation in France, starting with the first translations of Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani in the early 1970s, to Emile Habibi and Sahar Khalifa’s major works and finally the most recent publications by novelists of the younger generation such as Adania Shibli and Akram Musallam. It will analyse and question the publishers’ strategies, the translators’ choices as well as the broader politics of the reception of Palestinian literature in connection with the perception of the Palestine question in France.

The present paper is designed to shed some light on the lexical problems of Arabic-English subtitling as illustrated by the translation output of ten postgraduate translator trainees at Al- Quds University for the academic year 2010/2011. The data comprises an Egyptian movie entitled is-Safara fil-‘Imarah translated as ‘The Embassy is in the Building’. The paper reveals that subtitling students are faced with several lexical problems that are attributed not only to the fact that Arabic and English are poles apart in terms of lexis, but they are also akin to the technical dimension, very much respected in audiovisual translation. The study shows that the translator trainees are not only faced with lexical problems, but they also experience technical problems with varying degrees, which may have impact on subtitler’s lexical choice and deleterious effect on communicative thrust. The study concludes with some pedagogical implications that will hopefully help subtitling students deal with the problems in question.

Abstract
1. The dialogue of civilizations is the perennial scene of social and historical conflicts (along the lines of Bourdieu’s field concept), which belongs to the subject area and theory of translating (cf. Salevsky/Müller 2011). Translating is both an act of experience of otherness and a depiction of the other in the self. The different ways in which this happens cannot only be seen from translations of the same original for different civilizations and into different languages, but also from different translations for the same civilization and into the same language, and also from the fact that a specific translation may encounter opposition at a given time in a given civilization.
2. If civilization is regarded as a hierarchy of particular (semiotic) systems, as the sum of the texts and the set of functions correlated with them, or as a certain mechanism which generates these texts, it is possible to differentiate four aspects: the extra-cultural aspect (completely unknown to the members of the society concerned); the non-cultural aspect (known to the members of the society concerned, but perceived as antithetical to their own civilization); the culturally peripheral aspect (recognized by the members of the society concerned as part of their civilization, but not regarded as central); and the culturally central aspect (recognized by the members of the society concerned as part of their civilization and regarded as essential for their identity). This classification makes it possible to point out approaches to former and present-day segments of reality.
To what extent translations reflect a given civilization (with its communicative communities) and the relationship between the source and target text civilization can be gauged above all from concepts, persons, quotations, events and places with historical and cultural connotations. We are dealing here with processes of social and economic interconnection, with freedom, guilt and responsibility of the individual, with the legitimatization of a specific perspective on history and the present, which govern the translation.
3. This will be illustrated by translations of the story “Vse tečet” by the Ukrainian writer Vasilij Grossman (1905-1964) into German (“Alles fließt”) and into English (“Forever flowing”). The first manuscript of the story was seized in Moscow in1961, not least it would seem because of its portrayal of four types of Judas. The second version was circulated as a samizdat publication, which found its way into the West on microfilm and provided the basis for the first publication of the Russian original (1970) and for the first German translation (1972), both brought out by the Possev-Verlag in Frankfurt am Main. The second German translation was published in 1990 by Volk und Welt, formerly an East German publishing house. This was based on the first version to come out in the Soviet Union, which appeared in 1989 in the periodical Oktjabr (No. 6), i.e. 25 years after Grossman’s death. The third German translation was published by Ullstein in 2010, 20 years after German reunification. Each of the three translati ns into German had to take into account a different context with different prerequisites for understanding. Examples drawn from the three German translations (1972, 1990 and 2010) and from the American version (by Harper & Row, New York, 1972) are to illustrate how each of these translations is a mirror of the dialogue of the civilizations at a given point in time and at a given place.

الحضارة الإنسانية، كصانعها لا تبقى على حال، تولد في مكان وتنمو وتتطور ويشتد عودها لتبلغ الأوج والنضج، ثم تؤول للتقهقر والتراجع، وتذوى مظاهرها في مكان، لتبرعم وتخضر، في مكان آخر، وتواصل مسيرة العطاء، برعاية أمة أخرى، وفي عصر آخر، بناءً على ما انتهت عنده في مراحل سابقة، لتكون الترجمة هي الوسيلة والأداة الأنجع للتلاقي والتواصل، والحوار والتحضر.