Doha: Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding (SHATIU) held a symposium titled ‘The Reality and Prospects of Translation between Arabic and Turkish’ at the beginning of the 8th edition of the award for the year 2022, with the participation of a number of Turkish academics and translators via video conferencing technology.
During the symposium, moderated by the professor of Turkish language at the University of Jordan Dr. Ali Miqdadi, the award’s Media Adviser Dr. Hanan Al Fayyad reviewed the award’s objectives, vision, the process for the annual financial distribution, and the award categories for this new edition.
The first category includes translation in single books and is subdivided into the following: translation from Arabic into English, translation from English into Arabic, translation from Arabic into Turkish, and translation from Turkish into Arabic, she said, adding that the value of awards for each is $200,000.
Dr. Hanan noted that the second category includes achievement awards in the selected sub-languages, which this year is the translation from Arabic into Bahasa Indonesia, Kazakh, Romanian, Swahili and Vietnamese, and vice versa.
The award, she said, is given to a group of works translated from these languages into Arabic or from Arabic into those languages. In this category, the total value of the awards is $1m. The third category is allocated for achievement in the two main languages, English and Turkish, and the value of this award is $200,000.
For his part, Professor of Arabic Language at the Faculty of Islamic Sciences at Ankara Yildirim Beyazit University Dr. Yakup Civelek dealt in his paper with Turkey’s experience in translation into Arabic, its nature, and the history of official and individual efforts, reviewing the history of translation between the two languages, where professional works were translated from Arabic into Turkish.
Director of the Arabic Language Department at Gazi University in Ankara Dr. Mehmet Hakki Sucin reviewed his experience in the field of translation between Arabic and Turkish, and his important translations from classical Arabic literature, most prominently, Seven Muallaqat, a poetic translation for the first time in Turkish, and Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan and Tawq Al Hamamah by Ibn Hazm Al Andalusi.
Regarding his translations into Arabic, Dr. Sucin said that he had recently translated an anthology of the poetry of Yunus Emre, who lived in central Anatolia between the mid-thirteenth century to the first quarter of the fourteenth century, writing his poems in Turkish instead of the Persian prevailing at the time. The anthology included more than 50 poems translated into Arabic.
