Damascus-SANA
The reality of the Syrian national experience in the field of translation and ways to advance it. Themes touched upon by the National Seminar on Translation 2021, whose activities were launched today at the Al-Assad National Library in Damascus, with the participation of experienced Syrian translators in transferring science, knowledge and literary products to and from Arabic.
The symposium, which the Syrian General Book Organization has been holding since 2017, coinciding with the celebration of International Translation Day, Dr. Zubaydah Al-Qadi read the speech of the Syrian translators, which addressed the role of the translator in Syria by conveying the values of goodness, justice and beauty that our country presented to the world, appealing to all translators in the world to stand by Syria in the face of the terrorist aggression against it and the lifting of the illegal and immoral sanctions targeting the Syrian people in their daily, cultural and literary lives.
During a speech delivered by the Minister of Culture, Dr. Lubana Mushawah, she considered that translation is a human act that addresses the recipient and his communicative needs and expectations to enhance his knowledge of the world, calling on all those concerned with translation, individuals and institutions, not to be lenient or lenient in this section and to choose what truly meets the needs and requirements of development.
Dr. Ghassan Al-Sayed, director of authorship in the Book Authority, read a set of recommendations that he made on behalf of Dr. Thaer Zain Al-Din, director of the authority, which included working on a decision to raise the translation tariff and solve the forms of foreign publishing rights by setting up certain legal mechanisms for the purchase of rights in their regular form, in addition to his emphasis on the need to promote Private publishing houses, the Arab Writers Union and universities in enriching the national translation project, among others.
The introduction that the translator puts in every book he transmits to Arabic was the focus of Dr. Wael Barakat’s intervention, indicating its importance as the juicer of the translator’s ideas to attract the reader and help him understand it, to be the link between the translated work and the recipient, in addition to its importance in expressing the translator’s possession of the language, knowledge and sufficient awareness to understand the text that encourages the reader to receive it.
The translator Hussam El-Din Khaddour reviewed the reality and prospects of translation in Syria by establishing a national center for translation and a union entity for it along the lines of what is prevalent worldwide, in addition to providing human resources for translation in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi and other languages by national universities, suggesting some recommendations such as the separation between authorship and translation and the creation of New colleges for teaching languages whose peoples play an active role at the international level, and the establishment of an association of Syrian translators working in all fields of translation.
Dr. Jihad Bekfaloni dealt with in his focus the translation movement in the Arab Writers Union, which he considered acceptable in comparison to the difficult circumstances we are going through, in addition to the existence of a specialized magazine concerned with translating literary texts and some scientific topics on living languages, in addition to the Translation Association, which is trying to advance its members by treating them as writers. However, he found that the number of books translated from foreign languages into Arabic during the process of the union over fifty years is modest.
The symposium, which will be held in cooperation with the Translation Association of the Writers Union, Damascus University, the Higher Institute of Translation, the Syrian Publishers Union and private translation institutions tomorrow, will discuss the role of Damascus University in translation and the experience of private publishing houses in it, in addition to the reality of theater translation in Syria and the obstacles to translation work in public and private institutions. Some individual experiences in this field.
It is noteworthy that the International Day of Translation is an occasion celebrated globally on the thirtieth of September of each year, the Feast of Saint Jerome, the translator of the Bible, launched for the first time by the International Federation of Translators in 1991.
Shatha Hammoud