(MENAFN- The Peninsula) The Peninsula
Doha: The media committee of the sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding (SHATIU) organised a webinar entitled“At the translation table.. Sheikh Hamad Award and the Question of acculturation” recently.
The webinar brought together a group of academics working in translation in Turkish and Romanian languages, and media professionals from Qatar, Turkey and Romania. The webinar was moderated by Jordanian academic and critic Dr. Imtenan Al Smadi. The participants discussed choosing the Turkish language as the second main language and the Romanian language in the achievement category for the 8th edition of the award.
At the beginning of the session, the spokesperson and Media Adviser to Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding, Dr. Hanan Al Fayyad, spoke about the award's philosophy and vision, noting that the Qatar launched the award in 2015, to honour translators and in appreciation to their role in strengthening friendship and cooperation among the peoples of the world, encouraging creativity, and consolidating human values. The award aims to consolidate the culture of knowledge and dialogue, spread Arab and Islamic culture, develop international understanding, and encourage mature acculturation between Arabic language and the rest of the world's languages through translation she added.
Speaking about the conditions for contesting in various categories of the award for individuals, as well as institutions, she said the award relies on solid scientific methods and committees from around the world to ensure its impartiality, noting that the award's board of trustees chose translation in the fields of humanities and social sciences because of its positive effects in achieving cross-cultural communication between civilizations. Al Fayyadh indicated that the eighth edition includes prizes for the first category is divided into four branches: translation from Arabic to English, translation from English to Arabic, translation from Arabic to Turkish, and translation from Turkish to Arabic, and the value of each one is $200,000, and the first place winner gets $100,000. The second place gets $60,000, and the third place gets $40,000, she said pointing out that choosing the Turkish language as a second language for the second time has come due to its importance in achieving Arab-Turkish cultural rapprochement.
She added that the second category includes achievement awards in the selected sub-languages including Bahasa Indonesia, Kazakh, Romanian, Swahili and Vietnamese, where the award is given to a group of works translated from these languages into Arabic, and from Arabic into those languages. The total prize for this category is $1m. The third category is devoted to achievement in the two main languages (English and Turkish), and the value of this award is $200,000, stressing that the award follows the efforts of translators.
Turkish professor and translator Mehmet Hakki Süçin, Head of the Arabic Language Department at Gazi University in Turkiye, stressed on the importance of translation in the mutual cultural influence, and the transfer of creativity of civilizations, referring to the history of translation in the Islamic world since the Abbasid era, and working to transfer science and knowledge of Greek into Arabic and other Muslim languages.
The Jordanian translator Safwan Al Shalabi, winner of the (SHATIU) for translation from Turkish to Arabic in 2015, reviewed his experience in the field of translation, stressing that the Award was an important motive for his contribution to the translation that he started by chance. He said the history of translation between Arabic and Turkish language was not old because the educated elite in the past knew both languages in both sides, so there was no urgent need for translation, and translation began with religious books, until the eighties of the last century, and then moved to literary books.
Dr. Ali Miqdadi, a lecturer at the University of Jordan, pointed out that the depth of the historical ties between the Arab and Turkish civilizations, stressing that translation is a tool of peace and communication between peoples, what the award does. As for the translator Mazen Al-Rifai, Director of the Arab News Agency in Romania, he talked about the importance of translation and the reality of translation between Arabic and Romanian language, and that it is still insignificant and is largely confined to religious translation despite its difficulty, such as translating the meanings of the Qur'an and a number of Islamic heritage books, while literary translations are still weak he noted.
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