Group Boosts Arabic Translations In Brazil

(MENAFN- Brazil-Arab News Agency (ANBA)) São Paulo – Eleven years ago, a group of undergraduate, graduate, master's, doctoral, and postdoctoral students came together to discuss and jointly tackle the challenges of Arabic literary translation in Brazil. This marked the birth of Tarjama, which is Arabic for“translation”, a collective coordinated by Safa Jubran, a Lebanese native of Marjeyoun. She arrived in Brazil in 1982, stayed, became a professor at the University of São Paulo (USP ), a researcher, and the most respected translator of Arabic literature in the country.

The research group is affiliated with the same institution where Jubran teaches and has been approved by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).“It's like a school for modern Arabic literature translators, where people join, study, learn, and either move on or stay. It's not a group of professionals but of learners,” she emphasizes. According to Jubran, 90% of its members are Brazilians with no Arab ancestry.“And some have already published translations,” she adds.

Jubran recalls that when she arrived in Brazil, there was little availability of literary translations, as publishers were not interested in Arabic literature.“The only exception was The Book of One Thousand and One Nights.” However, this has changed over the years, and she highlights a few reasons.“The interest of Brazilian publishers and readers in directly translated Arabic literature, with no mediation of another foreign language, began to grow when Egypt's Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, and later with the events of September 11.”

But Jubran believes the most significant moment in this discovery has been unfolding since the creation of a publishing house focused on Arabic literature.“Tabla has been providing a large number of high-quality direct translations,” she says.

Since its inception in 2013, Tarjama's work has been interrupted a few times, but starting with the pandemic, meetings moved online, allowing people who don't live in Brazil to participate. In the group's workflow, participants present their translation suggestions for a pre-selected excerpt.“Every year, we choose different material. We've worked with short stories, then a novella, and now we've returned to short stories,” she explains. These first translated stories were published in academic journal Criação e Crítica (2020), and the novella is currently being revised for future publication.“We're preparing this year's collection of stories to be published in another academic journal, thus further expanding the dissemination of Tarjama's work.”

To carry out the work, the professor says there are various challenges, some inherent to the translation process itself or the mediation between two languages and multiple cultures.“Each work presents its own translation difficulties and challenges. That's basically what we discuss in Tarjama.” She explains one of the obstacles present in nearly all texts is the alignment of verb tenses,“Portuguese and Arabic handle this in very different ways. There's also the challenge of marking dialectal speech that may appear in the text, as well as idiomatic expressions unique to each language.”

When Jubran arrived in Brazil, she didn't speak Portuguese, but once she decided to settle in the country, she began studying, took the university entrance exam, and enrolled in college.“Learning Portuguese wasn't easy-it required a lot of dedication on my part, and in fact, even after more than 40 years here, I'm still learning,” she reveals. Under her care, more than 20 works, including classical texts and a grammar book, have been translated into Brazilian Portuguese, along with several others she translated from Brazilian Portuguese into her native language. For 2025, Tarjama plans to work with texts by young writers addressing contemporary themes.“Young writers being translated by young translators.”

Read more:
Muslims keep Arabic language alive in Brazil

Reportagem de Paula Medeiros, em colaboração com a ANBA.

Translated by Guilherme Miranda

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