Events
30.09.2015, 7:00 PM Transparent Translator
Alexandria
On September 30, 2015, in celebration of International Translators Day (“St. Jerome Day”), the Goethe-Institut Alexandria organized an event revolving around translation. The young Egyptian translator, Heba Shalaby allowed the audience to look over her shoulder as she translated a paragraph from the novel, “The Language of Birds” by Norbert Scheuer. Heba Shalaby began her presentation with a few words about why she had chosen the novel by Norbert Scheuer and discussed which reference books (dictionaries, Duden, etc.) she relies on for her work.
The reader’s reception, according to Shalaby, plays a crucial role in the translation process. The translator must always assume that the reader has no background information. Her job, therefore, also consist in properly introducing the reader to the work; this includes a painstaking analysis of the language, which can take an enormous amount of time. Some sentences can take a week to examine in terms of their literal and sense meaning. It is also essential to have an adequate amount of time to allow the translation to sit, so that after checking and rechecking, writing and rewriting, it is possible to find an even better rendering.
The audience asked several questions after the presentation, for example, about the process of transferring specific contexts from the source language into the target language; under what circumstances dialects can be integrated into a book that uses a high linguistic register; and whether a translated work should or should not use footnotes.
Hussein Gaafar, Goethe-Institut Alexandria
The reader’s reception, according to Shalaby, plays a crucial role in the translation process. The translator must always assume that the reader has no background information. Her job, therefore, also consist in properly introducing the reader to the work; this includes a painstaking analysis of the language, which can take an enormous amount of time. Some sentences can take a week to examine in terms of their literal and sense meaning. It is also essential to have an adequate amount of time to allow the translation to sit, so that after checking and rechecking, writing and rewriting, it is possible to find an even better rendering.
The audience asked several questions after the presentation, for example, about the process of transferring specific contexts from the source language into the target language; under what circumstances dialects can be integrated into a book that uses a high linguistic register; and whether a translated work should or should not use footnotes.
Hussein Gaafar, Goethe-Institut Alexandria