Language and its whims

Which way the Tower of Babel? Mohamed Moftah finds translation tricky
Jorge Luis Borges described Edward Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khayyam as follows:
"A miracle happens: from the fortuitous conjunction of a Persian astronomer who condescends to write poetry, and an eccentric Englishman who peruses Oriental and Hispanic books, perhaps without completely understanding them, emerges an extraordinary poet who does not resemble either of them. Swineburne writes that Fitzgerald has given Omar Khayyam a perpetual place among the greatest poets of England ... "
Fitzgerald created this work through an understanding of some basic concepts in Khayyam's quatrains, concerning the evanescence of life, God's relationship with man and an appreciation of the sensuous things that the world offers. If he had relied solely on a dictionary, his translation would have been incomprehensible.
Translation is essential for the dialogue between civilisations. If speakers of different languages cannot understand each other, the commerce of goods and ideas becomes impossible. Throughout the ages, translators were held in high regard and occupied important positions in the royal courts. Thanks to their efforts, the Arabs were able to read Greek philosophy and become acquainted with the concept of zero. Translated, the knowledge that the Arabs had amassed and created was to ignite the Renaissance.
When Mohamed Ali Pasha decided that Egypt should take a place among the world powers, he sent groups of students to France to study translation, engineering and medicine. Eventually a School of Translation (Madrasat Al- Alson) was founded to facilitate Egypt's greatly increased relationships with the rest of the world.
For the past 200 years, Egypt has always had large foreign expatriate and resident communities whose members do not speak Arabic. In a nod of courtesy to these numerous guests, street signs, names of companies, bank notes, postage stamps and car licence plates carry both Arabic and Latin scripts. Radio Cairo's European Service, one of the few FM radio stations available in Cairo, broadcasts in Italian, German, Greek, Armenian, English (of sorts) and (Levantine) French.
French was once widely used as the second official language but has effectively been replaced by English. According to the minister of interior, new Egyptian passports will be issued in Arabic and English (the latter instead of French).
The minister, however, did not specify who would translate the Arabic text on the passport into English. Will the ministry depend on its own resources, or will it forward the request to the dusty archive in the Citadel where an old factotum with a dictionary has been in charge of government translation work for nearly half a century?
This sheikh of translators, who prefers to remain anonymous, began his career as a young civil servant in 1956, after graduating from the Faculty of Letters with a degree in Semitic languages. It was a period of heady nationalism and Egyptianisation was pursued with great vigour, leading many of Egypt's indigenous resident foreign communities to emigrate to homelands they had never known.
The translator in chief was handed an Arabic-English/ English-Arabic dictionary in one volume and told to fulfil requests regarding the English translations and spellings of words, which would be forwarded to him by different agencies of the Egyptian government.
The first request came a few days before 18 June 1956, when the British were scheduled to evacuate their troops from the Canal Zone (they did so, although a few months later, they tried to come back). The day was to be declared a public holiday and a commemorative postage stamp was on the verge of being issued. The translator, urgently asked to suggest an English name for this momentous event, unabashedly came up with the prosaic Evacuation Day. English speakers were somewhat aghast when they received the stamp, but the picture of a British Tommy boarding a ship clarified the situation.
With the nationalisations of the 1960s, he was given another golden opportunity. Companies and government organisations were given long and unwieldy Arabic names. Many of the new names contained the word 'Amma. While leafing through his dictionary, he discovered that the word had two meanings: public, and general. To be on the safe side, he decided to call the newly nationalised companies and corporations "the public sector" when referring to them collectively, but to use the word "general" in their individual names. Thus did public-sector companies end up with names like the Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation and the General Engineering and Motor Company. For good measure, he included the word "general" in the names of all specialised government bodies. That is how we ended up with the General Organisation for Industrialisation and the General Authority for Investment and Free Zones.
To a non-speaker of Arabic, the word general, in this context, is confusing -- perhaps implying that they are all conglomerates, or at least not specialised. Whether or not the names made sense to foreigners was only one of his considerations, however. Those were dangerous times and he wanted to keep the generals running the companies happy by including their rank in the names of the companies.
The translator found that his talent for rendering English into Arabic was also in demand, and began moonlighting for the firm that produced sub-titles for English-language films. He received scripts which he had to translate without seeing the films. Given a choice of possible words to use, he would flip a coin to determine his selection. The subtitles left many Arabic-speaking spectators utterly bewildered, but no one complained.
His next test was the Arabic word Naksa, used as a euphemism for the defeat of 1967. Some very important officials needed an English equivalent of the word that could be used instead of the expression "the Six-Day War." According to the Arabic dictionary he had been allocated, the word meant a sickness after a period of convalescence. The Arabic-English dictionary only listed the word relapse. He did not think that relapse would do the job, because foreigners wouldn't understand that the sickness was the period before the Revolution, and that the convalescence was the period from 1952 to 1967. While leafing through the dictionary, he serendipitously stumbled on the word "setback." This was a moment of which he was truly proud. The word proved to be such a huge success that "setback," along with relapse, became a standard translation of Naksa.
His biggest failure was in 1977, when Sadat came up with the slogan "Intifadat Al-Haramiya" to describe the civil disturbances that erupted in January. He coined the phrase "the tremor of the thieves," but the foreign press snidely translated Sadat's description as the "thieves' uprising," and insisted on calling it the food riots.
Although our friend reached retirement age in 1985, his tenure was extended because he was deemed indispensable.
When the flyovers began swooping and dipping over the capital, signs in English and Arabic were placed on the entrance and exit ramps. Due to lack of space on the signs, abbreviations were needed. He came up with Cairo TW for Cairo Tower, and CC for city centre. With the completion of the Cairo ring road along with a number of axial roads, he was given his last assignment, which placed him in a bit of a quandary. A name was required for the longest and most important axial road, which was the 26 July extension, intersecting with the ring road and eventually reaching 6 October City. Immediately he realised that naming it the 26 July Axial Road would lead to Israeli objections. He imagined Israeli government spokesmen on CNN accusing Egypt of anti-Semitism for honouring the World War II alliance of Germany, Italy and Japan. He opted, instead, to name it the 26 July Corridor, honouring the Polish Danzig Corridor, Germany's invasion of which led to the destruction of the Third Reich.
With the spread of the Internet, demand for his work disappeared. With so many on-line dictionaries and translation services freely available, every government department began to do its own translation work and he was forgotten in his small room in the basement of the Citadel.
On a recent visit he began to complain about the free-for- all, and made dour predictions of chaos.
For instance, a department of the Ministry of Culture had come up with the pidgin Culture Affair Production Sector to place on a billboard (next to the Cairo Opera House) that pointed the way to the department in question.
He was incensed that the site for the Egyptian Museum is at best a guessing game. One of his grandsons had taken him on a tour of the site. The home page has the following greeting: "The museum exhibited collections now exceed 120000 objects ranges from pre historic era to the Greco- Roman period."
Throughout the site birds of prey bear the caption "Valture," and what could be statuettes are labelled "single."
Even private organisations, he complained, had decided to render Arabic into English without professional help. He had seen a site about the Muslim Brotherhood, which carried the following disclaimer: "The maintainer of this page is not a member of Al-Ikhwan patry and does not approve or agree with everything they say. This page is there for the soul perpose of answering the questions you always had and never knew who to ask."
He is very sad about this sorry state of affairs, but thinks those who are fluent in foreign languages are unduly harsh on native translators. After all, English speakers, who are so proud of the language's precision and capacity to incorporate new words every day, still use the word "veil" for both a woman's headdress and the cloth that conceals her face. In fact, there isn't even a word in English for the sound that a camel makes.
He has submitted a number of retirement requests, but it seems that the employee in charge cannot find his file. His only consolation is that he may end up being the longest- serving bureaucrat in the Egyptian government since modern records were kept.
Recommend this page
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
Send a letter to the Editor