(MENAFN- The Peninsula) deepak john |
The Peninsula
Doha: Translation plays vital role to bridge the linguistic and cultural gaps as it goes beyond geographical boundaries of language and taps into bringing people together, said an official.
Speaking to The Peninsula on the sidelines of 12th International Translation conference held as part of HBKU's Translation and Interpreting Institute (TII)'s 10th anniversary, Dr. Amal Mohammed Al Malki, Founding Dean College of Humanities and Social Sciences, HBKU, said,“TII was established in 2012 based on the vision of H H Sheikha Moza bint Nasser to have a center of excellence in education and service in translation and languages. Ten years forward, we are very proud to have been contributing to not just education and research but also to cultural scene in the country.”
“We offer three Master programmes in TII, two translation and one Intercultural Communication. We have a language center with 12 languages for adults and 6 language for kids and we also have translation, training, and services center.
"The journey was not easy but the fact that Qatar has always been a diverse place where different people come together, translation played huge role in bridging linguistic gaps but also cultural gaps building on commonality between people enriching the multi-cultural scene. We have seen a huge role in FIFA World Cup 2022, and we are very proud to be one of the main players who made this tournament the most accessible in the world,” she added.
Dr. Al Malki explained that "one of the aspects we focused on is accessibility, transcriptions, and audio commentaries of the matches were done by our people. All of the cultural events around the World Cup, whether museum or cultural events were also facilitated and transferred to different population of visitors by our people."
Translation goes beyond geographical boundaries of language and nationality. It taps into culture, identity, cultural transfer and bringing people together and having a dialogue between multiple people.
Historically, Qatar has always been diverse, it's a place which connects east and west, north and south.
She said,“Qatar right now is not just a cultural hub, it's a multi-cultural hub where different people come to make it their home or create and help Qatar to become at the forefront of many fields in the world. We see how we are the cultural city of the world. We also see that the World Cup has put us on the map internationally and I think translation, language and culture are at the heart of that.”
Also, talking to The Peninsula, Dr. Julie Boeri, Associate Professor in Master of Arts in Translation Studies at HBKU said,“In last ten years we developed PhD in Humanities and Social Sciences, Master of Arts in Intercultural Communication and many other projects. We have developed clusters in the college that are interdisciplinary for people working in women studies, gender studies and intercultural studies, translation studies, accessibility, digital humanities with different epistemological approaches and methodologies.
“Translation in Qatar is a vibrant profession. It is a very developed industry with the need across the sector for conference interpreters but also in medical centers, in healthcare to ensure that interpreters provide access to health care and education.”“Qatar is a country that needs and develops translation interpreting on a daily basis as we saw in the World Cup. So, it is a very vibrant country to give a lot translation and interpreting but also intercultural communication which includes crossing language barriers but also cultural barriers,” she added.