BEYOND
    LITERARY
              BOUNDS

    AUC’s newly established Center for Translation Studies provides a forum for leading Arabic-English translators to promote outreach programs in the literary field

 By Henry Agbo

    AUC has launched a new Center for Translation Studies that aims to foster collaborative outreach programs as well as research in translation studies in order to enhance interaction and cooperation between AUC, Egyptian, regional and international institutions.

    The Center for Translation Studies has set an ambitious agenda including a lecture series called In Translation that features prominent English-Arabic translators; a yearly international translation studies conference; workshops and seminars for researchers, students, faculty members and professional translators; a translator-inresidence program that will host distinguished translation theorists and practitioners each semester; and a yearly bilingual journal showcasing the best in student translation. Eventually, the center plans to offer a one-year diploma and a two-year master’s degree, both in translation studies.

    “We will focus on interdisciplinary work and will encourage the free exchange of ideas to promote translation as a cultural political practice that can enable innovation and generate new spaces for the development of individual societies and cross-cultural conversation,” said Samia Mehrez, professor of Arabic literature at AUC and the center’s director.

    The center’s lecture series has featured some of the most prominent English-Arabic translators in the world, such as Denys Johnson-Davies, who has translated the works of Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris, Tawfik Al Hakim, Yahya Hakki and others; Humphrey Davies, who translated the acclaimed The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al-Aswany and the Arab Booker Award-winning novel Sunset Oasis by Bahaa Taher; as well as Khaled Al Khamissi, author of the bestselling novel Taxi, and his distinguished translator Jonathan Wright. In his address, Denys Johnson-Davies explained that “nothing moves without translation,” emphasizing the critical role that translators play as mediators of different cultural and literary worlds.

Denys Johnson-Davies with Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz (left) and speaking at AUC (center); Wright and Al Khamissi at AUC