Arabic Translation Workshops

Arabic Poetry and Stories Translation Workshops
'It was and it was not…' Translation in Action (from Arabic into English)
Oxford
May 11, May 25, June 6, June 25 2017
Funded by CHASE, at Birkbeck College and School of Oriental and African Studies, London
The Arabic Translation Workshop was a continuation in spirit of the 'The Bearer-Beings' events at Oxford in 2016
and consisted of four translation and creative writing workshops in London. These were small groups, limited
to twenty-four participants, focused on rendering Arabic, including literature from Sicily during
the period when Arabic was one of the island's languages. Stories from the Arabian Nights (including verse passages),
folklore, and the contemporary writers Hanan al-Shaykh, Adhaf Soueif, and Tamim al-Barghouti visited the workshops to
read and discuss their work. The aim of this series is to explore how non-Arabic speakers can participate and learn
from processes of translation from Arabic, and thereby to understand how such collaborative translation practices can
help build imaginative communities to address the current migration crisis. Writers with other languages were especially
integral during this workshop as bridges to Arabic and a third of those who were present were Arabists or native speakers
of Arabic. To view a flyer for the workshops, as well as a more detailed description of the objectives, please
click here.
More dates to be announced.
To view a video of group discussions during the workshop to exchange news of the efforts that had been made, please see YouTube channel here.
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Next project: → Words on the Move I
Previous project: ← The Bearer-Beings