Attendees during the 9th International Conference on Translation and Problems of Interculturalizing in Doha, yesterday.
Doha: The 9th International Conference on Translation and Problems of Interculturalizing kicked off in Doha yesterday, organised by the Forum for Arab and International Relations, after having been held virtually in the previous two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Director of the Forum for Arab and International Relations Dr. Mohammed Hamed Al Ahmari led off the conference with an opening speech introducing the conference and stating its objectives, noting the State of Qatar’s role in supporting translation and translators, through its Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding.
Director of the Forum for Arab and International Relations underlined the important role of intellectual-translators who convey global languages and cultures to the Arab and Islamic worlds, equally as they transfer Arab thought into world languages, noting that the Arab and Islamic worlds encompassed, protected and translated from foreign languages and cultures in the past, giving the world some great names in translation who transferred the works of Greek, Persian and Indian cultures, and whose works gained fame even in foreign cultures.
Al Ahmari also valued translators’ efforts in transferring Arab and Islamic cultures to the rest of the world.
The conference’s first session was dedicated to the topic of Arabic/Turkish translation.
The session started with a study conduced by Dr. Mehmet Celik, translator, researcher, and member of the teaching staff at the Faculty of Islamic Studies at the Fatih Sultan Mehmet University - Turkiye, on the Ottoman translation movement from Arabic into Turkish and its most important characteristics.
On the other hand, Dr. Aysel Ergul Keskin, head of the Department of Arabic-Turkish Translation at Istanbul Aydin University, overviewed the Arabic literary works translated into Turkish during the period 2013-2023.
The research of the translator, Dr. Burhan Koroglu, dean of faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Ibn Haldun University - Turkey, and professor of Islamic philosophy, shed light on the role of translation from Arabic in the framework of strengthening links with Islamic culture and thought in Turkiye.
The session concluded with a study done by Saut Yusuf Akyuz, translator, Ottoman and Arab-Turkish relations history researcher, and lecturer at Ankara Yildirim Beyazit University, on the reality and challenges of translation movement from Turkish into Arabic and the role of Turkish institutions.
Several research papers were discussed in the second session of the conference, which revolved around the topic of self-translation.
The research paper on “self-translation and identity” by the Director of Programmes in the Unesco Chair at the University of Kufa, Iraq, Dr. Ahmed Basem Saadoun, indicated that the self-translation may give identity a cultural diversity that makes it more open to the world.
