Arabic-L:TRANS:Americana in Arabic

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Fri 28 Mar  2004
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:Americana in Arabic

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1)
Date: 28 Mar 2004
From:Jackie Murgida <jmurg at ttlc.net>
Subject:Americana in Arabic

Dear Friends and Colleagues,
This is FYI, only, sent to me by a member of the New England  
Translators Association. I'm not advocating contributions. There may be  
some translation work available down the line.
Best regards,
Jackie

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PLEASE SHARE WITH INTERESTED PARTIES
 
Informed Comment

 Global Americana Intitute

The “Americana in Arabic” Translation Program

A Project of the Global Americana Institute

The classics of American thought and literature have been little  
translated into Arabic. Worse, even when they have been translated,  
they have appeared in small editions (typically no more than 500 copies  
printed). Worse still, the distribution system for Arabic books is  
poor, and there are few public libraries, so that many books that have  
been published in the past are no longer available to most readers.

I have therefore decided to begin a project to translate important  
books by great Americans and about America into Arabic, and to  
subsidize their publication so that they can be bought inexpensively. I  
hope also to subsidize their distribution.

This project is a non-profit. I am in the process of applying for 501c3  
status for it as a charitable foundation. My understanding is that if I  
apply for that status within 15 months of February 2004, donors will be  
able to claim a tax deduction right from the organization date. The  
articles of incorporation have gone to the state of Michigan, which is  
the first step, and when they are accepted I will begin the process  
with the IRS. I will announce it immediately as the process is  
completed.

Supporters desiring updates on the project may join an email  
announcement list at: The Web Site of the Global Americana Institute.

The project will begin with a selected set of passages and essays by  
Thomas Jefferson on constitutional and governmental issues such as  
freedom of religion, the separation of powers, inalienable rights, the  
sovereignty of the people, and so forth.

I hope to have all the founding fathers translated—Madison, Franklin,  
Washington, Paine, and so on. I would also like to see works that treat  
issues in democracy and multi-culturalism. I cannot find in OCLC, an  
electronic catalogue of over 40 million books held in participating  
libraries, any Arabic translation of the major speeches and letters of  
Martin Luther King or of the works of Susan B. Anthony. Eventually it  
would be nice to see in Arabic a good solid book about, e.g., the  
history of the American Jewish community, and other important minority  
groups about which most Arabs know nothing.

Likewise, it would be nice to put into Arabic Western books about Iraq.  
  Our Middle East Studies programs and university presses publish a  
great deal of interest to the Arab world, and yet little of it gets  
translated, and even where books are translated they sometimes take a  
long time to get into print.

Contributions will allow me to locate and fund qualified Arab  
translators, to arrange for printing (possibly in Baghdad), to  
subsidize the printing so as to ensure the book is affordable and that  
there is a paperback version, and to subsidize and ensure wide  
distribution, to bookstores, street vendors and libraries. Although we  
will definitely launch a web site and try to make things available on  
the internet, readers should remember that that is still a small and  
underdeveloped medium in the Middle East. Inexpensive and  
well-distributed paperbacks will have more impact at this point in  
time.

Eventually, if we can attract enough funding, it might also be possible  
to subsidize courses on American studies at Arab universities or even  
to endow some chairs. The translations of source material would then be  
available for use in the classroom as texts. It is especially important  
to begin offering Arab high school teachers some training in American  
studies so that they can work it into social studies and literature  
classes, e.g.

The Global Americana Institute and the translation project are  
non-partisan and welcome support from and cooperation with all persons  
committed to democratic principles and human rights.

The Institute also hopes to build on past such efforts, which it  
acknowledges, and for which it is grateful. We would like to help with  
distribution and reprinting of suitable works already published. There  
is a small US government translation project that has done some  
excellent work, but its backlist on Americana is just a handful of  
works and it is not clear that most of them could be bought at  
bookstores in most of the Arab world. There was also an important  
Social Science Research Council translation project headed by Steve  
Heydemann and Dan Brumberg and published in Arabic by Saqi Books, which  
paid special attention to modern political philosophy.

In the middle decades of the twentieth century and until 1977, the  
Franklin Book Program helped publish hundreds of books in the Middle  
East, including a few on American subjects, but few of these are still  
in print or widely available. Franklin’s main emphasis was on fostering  
an independent book industry, and translations of Americana were a  
small part of its interest in the region. Some of the works it  
supported, such as `Abbas Mahmud al-`Aqqad’s biography of Benjamin  
Franklin, would be worthwhile republishing, assuming rights can be  
acquired.

Among our main goals, which I think are distinctive, is the formation  
of a large corpus of Americana in Middle Eastern languages, maintaining  
them in print and available inexpensively, and ensuring continued  
distribution and availability.

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End of Arabic-L:  28 Mar  2004