RIYADH: The UNESCO Chair in Translating Cultures at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, supported by the Literature, Publishing and Translation Commission, recently hosted three online workshops.
The workshops were attended by members of the Translating Cultures Lab and researchers with an interest in translating cultures.
The lab unites renowned scholars and early-career Saudi researchers to publish papers on the 2024 theme, “Rethinking Translating Cultures and its Conceptual Framework,” focusing on knowledge transfer and translation in the Global South.
At the workshops researchers presented papers and received feedback from lab members to refine them for publication.
In the first two workshops, six papers were presented, addressing issues in translating cultures, including cultural narratives, religious concepts such as “mahr” in Islam, and humor translation in modern Saudi literature.
Other topics included foreignizing and domesticating Arab culture in translation, translation as knowledge transfer, and translating Plastic Arts into Arabic.
The papers were presented by scholars from King Khalid University (Saudi Arabia), Indira Gandhi National Open University (India), Jagiellonian University (Poland), Mohammed I University Oujda (Morocco), the Catholic University of America (US), and an independent Australian researcher.
The third workshop reviewed papers for an edited volume by the Translating Cultures Lab on the theme of “Rethinking Translating Cultures.”
The UNESCO chair views “translating cultures” as a concept tied to broader debates in the humanities, regarding it as a continuous process involving translation, cross-cultural communication, and knowledge sharing.
