translation

The Arab world is not the only cultural or geopolitical area that must face the vital necessity of translating the modern knowledge produced by Europe and North America in our current times. Japan, China, India as well as South Korea worked relentlessly on translations throughout the twentieth century. More recently, at the turn of the century, and in the wake of important political upheavals, the former USSR countries started massively translating western classics. Muslim countries such as Turkey and Iran are facing the same challenge.

The question today facing the Arab countries (intellectual elite, universities, research centers, translation funds and programs, publishers etc.) is how to escape the current situation summed-up by Richard Jacquemond in a concise sentence that expresses all the Arab uneasiness: “we still translate very few, very late, never the books that must be translated and never as it should be”?

Situating language, linking it to the internal processes of translation that, between Greek, Latin, Slavic and Ottoman influences have made it, is to pose the political – and not just linguistic – stakes of the translation into Romanian of the European Vocabulary of Philosophies (EVP). The first section of the logbook is based on the notes that were prepared for the working seminars on the translations of the Vocabulary at the Fondation de Treilles (Var) in September 2009 and at the University of Rio de Janeiro in November 2009.

Quelle est la place des auteurs arabes dans les bibliothèques françaises? Quelles sont leurs politiques d’acquisition en la matière ? Quels sont les choix effectués pour la mise à disposition des fonds, et quels sont leurs enjeux ? Ce sont à ces questions que le séminaire et le débat public organisés le 7 novembre 2009 à la Bibliothèque de l’Institut du monde arabe par Transeuropéennes, la Bibliothèque de l’Institut du monde arabe et le ministère de la culture et de la Communication a tenté de répondre.

The point of departure for these notes is a work, the European Vocabulary of Philosophies. Dictionary of Untranslatables, which Transeuropéennes has decided to accompany in its transformations. So that a logbook of translations of untranslatables might  be maintained by many hands, with everything that a journal can have of the trivial and the thoughtful, the well-stitched and the incoherent - a Denktagebuch as far as is possible.

But what is surprising in this story, which often served as a prologue to our discussions and which fell like a verdict, is that one can rediscover - I rediscovered, at least - all the elements of a Babylonian myth of the origins of psychoanalysis in the Arab world, and a phantasmatics of loss: golden age, drama, dispersion. What of this drama then, if one takes the translation of the terminology of the founder of psychoanalysis as a telling example?

What makes a reflection on the future of “philosophy” as we knew it and practiced it (whether it will exist under the same name, separated from other scientific or social practices, etc.) at the same time urgent and confused, is among other reasons the fact that it is frequently reaching us through considerations on the geohistorical status of the association between the discourse and the institution.

The "Translations, Writings, Libraries" Workshop took place with the frame of the "Etats généraux culturels méditerranéens" organised in Marseille organised within the frame of the French Presidency of the European Union, on the 4th and 5th of Novembre 2008. We propose here after the conclusions as produced by the working group of this workshop, which is the launching event of the "Translating in the Mediterrean" project.