in that context he was talking about
schools of thought not a sectarianism
and so but that person didn't have a the
type of education that was necessary so
language is very difficult and when you
get into nuance
is your name hadir like
with a soft hat hadir
dr hadir it's hadir
hadir
yeah so if you look at hadir okay
hadir can mean the cooing of a pigeon
but i don't think that's what your
parents intended
hadir is a louder voice than the pigeons
here is the sound of the waves my my
parents are from alexandria that's why
they were fascinated with the sound of
the waves so
so so so but you can have
you can have hadira
uh i don't know about that yeah
well you can look in a dictionary you'll
find yeah i
i i i know that uh at least what they
meant is the
sound of the waves this is this is yes
so so those
so hadiya that was their intention so
when you have a language like arabic
arabic
is a very interesting language in that
sometimes
it's extraordinarily precise
and so you can't have an alternate
explanation
and other times it's extraordinarily
ambiguous
and so for instance if you take a word
like
uh jaur jaur
is is uh is it's only mentioned once in
the quran
in the ishtap it's
but if you take the word jawar jawar
is a voom from somebody in a position of
power so so in
in in english it would be closer to
tyranny than oppression
and so you talk about jorah sultan so if
you look for instance
in in in
in the uh in the baha'i which i
translated
he says
[Applause]
he didn't say wim valamuna
because he was being very precise about
the use of joe
he's talking about political oppression
and not just
which can happen a husband can have a
volume of the wife or vice versa
right so so you
so finding these in in
to be a really really good translator
uh and i'm not talking about translating
um
you know just oral translation when
you're doing spontaneous translation for
instance
which can be quite taxing and difficult
and i've done it and i don't like to do
it because it's it's very exhausting
especially when when you're having to to
uh
to keep up with the speaker if they're
speaking fast it becomes really
difficult
but sheikh i saw you uh interpreting for
shaykh many times
many times yes yeah yes but it's very
exhausting please
i would much rather translate his talk
and i do this very often if
if he has a talk i'll translate it
before because
he's very eloquent as a speaker and you
do a grave disservice to a speaker who's
extremely eloquent when you're not
translating in a type of language that
that somehow mirrors or at least
reflects
in some way the beauty of the language
that the person is speaking
and and so eloquence um you know
is much easier to do when you can sit
down and really think and you have a a
thesaurus and you have uh
a dictionary and and you can think about
it so
you know just in conclusion uh in
in in the concluding remarks before we
get into a conversation
i would say that you know arabic
what you need to know to be a good
translator
from arabic not into arabic because it's
always easier to
interpret to translate into your native
tongue it's it's actually
very few people that learn a language as
a second language are good at
translating into that language
there are those that really do learn it
but it's
it's much easier to go into your native
tongue than
from your native tongue into the
language that you've learned
so if you take um you know if you take
the english language
the the the english language is
uh an amalgam of several different
languages
it's private primarily dramatic germanic
it's arabic is a much purer language
um the the amount of loanwords in the
arabic language is
actually surprisingly small it's it's
probably increased
in the last 100 years more than in in
the last 2000 years
and traditionally jewish scholars had to
learn arabic
to get to the semitic roots of hebrew
because it was the arabs
and really the persians but i mean and
farah
is the first it was the arabs
who really created the science of of
of lexicons i mean they the first
truly scientific dictionaries
come out of of the arabic language and
prior to that
you had some dictionaries in china you
had some dictionaries in india
but dictionary was a very primitive
subject before the muslims
and the the the the the the
the jews did not start writing
dictionaries until after they saw what
the muslims were doing
and they didn't analyze their language
until after they saw what the persians
had done with arabic like they didn't
know that language was built on root
stems on
it's it's it's it's pretty amazing what
they learned from the arab
so you to be a good translator from
arabic into english you really
have to learn a lot of different
subjects
um there's there's 12 subjects that you
need to learn to to uh
to be a to be a translator there's at
least four that you have to be
seriously engaged with uh and i would
say now
and i'll include sort of in that now and
so
as a language is very very important you
also have to be
to know you know the uh
etymology uh and derivations um because
it's very important
um to to understand a word
in a deep sense um you also have to know
um what they call diction
which is word choice uh so vocabulary is
extremely important
and there's passive and active
vocabulary so vocabulary
many of us are our active vocabularies
are very limited but
but as an educated person we should have
a very
large passive vocabulary so that we can
understand words
and and and and then you have to know
rhetoric
uh balara is extremely important
uh and and uh at zatuna's students have
to take
balah in both english and arabic and
then finally i would say you you should
you should really read a lot of poetry
and the reason for that
is the best way to penetrate a language
is to study its poetry
because um poetry is
is uh is is it's it's
language charged to the maximum
um great poets are are
they they're working with language
exponentially
everybody else is working with language
arithmetically but poets
are are are working with language
geometrically
so um if you can if you can master
uh translating poems everything else
becomes very easy
and that's why it's good to as an
exercise to do
things like the lapad or um
some of the great and ebby or some of
the great poets
and and in diction i would add also
which is also the same for english
because every if you if you go into a
dictionary
you have one two three four five six
seven so you have
you have uh all these different meanings
like
hadir is a good example so if you look
in the dictionary you're gonna have all
these types
you're going to have all these different
uh and so what is it in the context of
what you're trying to translate
and and when you get like is a good
example
in arabic is a very hard word to
translate because it's
used for so many different um
different meanings especially when you
get into these classical writers
they're using words very specifically
and and and to try to get to what
and that's why the sherwood i mean
muslims created
an entire tradition of glossaries
because it was so important to have
commentaries on things
um the the prophet sam's language is
extremely subtle
uh extremely subtle and and and and his
word choice
is is is very purposeful
why he would choose one word over
another word
um you know and then getting into
finally
the glue words and the glue words are
going to be the most difficult words
that you learn but they're extremely
important
because glue words and and i'm talking
linguistically
about myania roof you know the
the glue words are the most difficult
words for artificial intelligence
so they have real problems with uh
prepositions because if you look like a
preposition like fee
has ten different meanings in arabic if
you look in morning
by ibn hisham fee has 10 different
meanings
min has 12 different meanings is it
minitab
is it is it min
you know these are all different
meanings so so
when the prophet saw i said i'm said you
know
differed on it some said he meant
beginning in chihuahua but you could do
it any time of year that's imamatic's
opinion
imam he said no it's only in chihuahua
because there he said it was
it was a partitive man it wasn't a min
right that's a partitive so these are
these are very difficult words to uh
to uh to penetrate uh in any language
but in particular in the arabic language
so i'll end with that
and and open it up thank you very much
for this insightful presentation
which will of course frame the
discussion and i know that it has
provoked so many things so many
questions
uh with the participants but i would
like to start from one statement
you made you said rightly
that arabic is much more
pure as a language than other languages
like english so this purity makes
it more a language of
the one nation but
quran the quran says
so my question is how would you
interpret
that verse especially with regard to the
dichotomy
between the locality
of the language for one nation
versus the universality of the message
the message
of islam do you
take this verse as an implicit
invitation or endorsement or even
encouragement or obligation
of the exercise of translation into
other languages
and how would you interpret
in this particular context
means in arabic and it is meant to be
for the universe so how the message is
going to be trans
as you mentioned earlier later or
transmitted
sure uh well first of all
um you know arabic is
is is a well-known family of languages
uh from from from the arabian peninsula
um
you you had different you you know
there's as you know there's three
arabs there's
there's the there's the out of the uh
and then there's the arab so the
language of quran is in the language of
the
arab you know these are these are the uh
the latter arabs that learned arabic
from the jarahima
the north when they moved into arabia
ismail being
the father of these people um they
learned arabic so
that that
language has different dialects
and and and and so for instance
in arabic which is uh mentioned in the
quran
uh most of the arabs did not know that
word that was a qurayshi word
uh it meant suff it had to be dyed wool
so in the in the must-have he said
as as a translation for the other arabs
to understand it but it loses the nuance
of being died
by by translating it into suf which was
common to the other arabs
and so the nuances of of the quran
uh can only be understood with a deep
understanding
of the er so for instance cade in arabic
you know if you look at kade in the
kedah kunal theme
you know your cade is vast you know
uh k is different from mecca
mecca and kade are similar but they're
not
synonyms and and cade is a stronger word
than mecca
with the the arabic word mecca needs a
preposition makarabihi
whereas caddo you go you can go straight
to and as you know
a language weakens the meaning weakens
when when you have to when you have uh
it becomes
uh more intransitive when what to make
it transitive with a preposition
diminishes the strength of the verb in
the same way that
um you know the ziyadat
so whenever you add letters to something
it it it like if you go to
it strengthens the meaning of that so
these type things are very important to
understand about the arabic language
and when allah says that he made the he
he
jaana itself there's a huge debate
in in the early history of between the
martesi
and between the the uh the the the
era and the maturity about
to the others meant something very
different that the vehicle
in which
um
and when allah uses it it also can mean
that it's
it's it's uh you know that it's it's
it's
it's going to happen
and then then you get into what is like
because is not intellect in the modern
sense of the word
you know the you know if you look at the
root meaning of
it comes from to to bind a a camel
you know
and so so and if you look at all the
words in arabic
like uh nuha comes from to to pro
to to prevent something you know hijab
is also hajjara to stop something so
words that in arabic deal with intellect
very often deal with with something
that restrains you and so
we reveal we put this into a quranic
arabic that perhaps
you might understand it and thus
enter into the hadood of allah to
restrain yourselves
from from harm why because you know
that perhaps you might protect
yourselves
and so the atoll is for two things it's
for
zhang masala it's to accrue benefit
and to ward off harm that's the essence
of why god's given us an intellect
and so the quran is is is
is is a book that can be understood
at many many levels and arabic is the
vehicle that allah chose to reveal this
book
because it is a deeply nuanced
language that enables extraordinary
possibility
of meaning to emerge uh
that you won't find in in in other
languages i mean i think the languages
of revelation
tend to share some some commonalities
hebrew is a very profound
language also some of the ancient
languages like sanskrit
and probably chinese um you know
heidegger thought greek had that
capacity but
i i don't i don't think that's true
greek is a
it's it's a secondary language it comes
out of uh
of of the ancient indic language
so thank you very much
we are going to take now the questions
of
the participants i can see
do you like we take them in rounds or
in questions one by one i would rather
do one by one if you don't mind
okay please yeah sami please
uh thank you very much
i am uh sami yeah from brussels
uh i feel very uh privileged to uh to
have this opportunity to talk to you
since i've been following you
since uh yes i've read your books
lots of which i think was one of your
old books called the
the purification of the heart
very interesting book very much
uh i i i have two questions
uh the first question
going as a an interpreter of
because i had the privilege to interpret
in berlin in 2017 when he came to uh
to berlin you weren't there with him i
was very disappointed by the way
because i i i wish to meet you on that
occasion
i found it very difficult to interpret
him because
when he was giving his speech from the
restroom it was okay because he was
reading so his arabic was classical
he takes the floor to answer a question
when he improvises we know that he comes
from uh
mauritania he doesn't speak very loudly
and
sometimes it's very difficult for for
interpreter to um to um
to hear what he says so i'd like to hear
your experience about
that specific topic how did you deal
with uh
his dialect yeah and how did you deal
with uh
with the uh the articulation of speech
with
sheikh binvaya um
i just want to preside that i'm uh
arabic and french mother tongues and i
have english
as a passive language so i interpret
from arabic into french
and from french into arabic um
as a you know as my classic uh
combination
of other
which is as well
your first um or the first things he
said about the process of translation
which
you described as
the the past signified from this um that
in order to be a translator we have at
least master
four out of 12 uh disciplines which are
grammar
uh i think seriously engaged you know
that you think that serious engagement
yeah
yeah i very definitely agree with you um
do you um because these four disciplines
um it seems to me that they they relate
only to the vehicle uh don't you think
that for a translator
or for an interpreter because we have to
do that spontaneously as we as you said
we say simultaneously
don't you think that we we have also
to have quite a lot of knowledge in
order to be able to
transfer uh or to extract the signified
from the significance yeah thank you so
okay so the first
question is you know i
spent years with him so i've gotten used
to
him i still every once i'll have a hard
time catching the word
this is what's not yeah so yeah so
he he tends to
sometimes so i didn't
catch it what um
feeling that you he's very good at he
gets sometimes
he'll get a little frustrated with me
but because he's thinking
at such a high he's at warp speed you
know his intellect
and so if if you kind of stumble
on it's going to disrupt his uh chain of
thought
so for him he prefers
that i let him speak and then stop
which i prefer doing it line by line
just to keep up with him because he's
hit the thing about chapel dolphin bay
he doesn't
waste words and he uses words it
i've never met anybody that that has the
level of arabic that he has and i've met
some really great masters of arabic but
i
actually know quite a bit about what he
actually knows in arabic
and so he's a difficult person to
translate
very good um and and he's also
like i used to hear him uh and
and i would think he made a mistake in
morphology you know like his
self because he would he would pronounce
it a way that i
had learned it another way you know like
i'd learned yeah
and so so when i'd go back and look at
the dictionaries
i found he was always right you know it
was just he was using a different
uh pattern
so i stopped looking him up didn't
realize he's he's not making mistakes
there i mean if you look at his
when he speaks arabic it's it's
quite extraordinary because even great
scholars make mistakes
and have lechen you know the more chains
have a proper
body you know that it's just arabic it's
a really hard language it's turned that
way
so that that's what i would say about
that it just and then
she is also working from a lot of
different knowledges and if you don't
know
like he uses logic you want men
out early here
what one of the things i wanted to say
is that that there's essentially two
types
of in terms of ulum that you're going to
be translating
one of the ulum has very transparent
words in the other language
so for instance mantip by and large is
almost
entirely translatable into english
if you study munta in both languages so
for instance
there's a somebody who translated a book
on logic from arabic here
and and and and he translated
as five utterances
and that's because he didn't know that
the actual
in english it's the five predicables
like there's a specific
term for that for that that resides in
both languages
so that's very important for a
translator to know the science he's
translating into
because if you if you don't know biology
you shouldn't be translating
a lecture by a biologist
and you have to so from that point of
view i'm assuming
uh you know cicero said that an orator
should have a vast
uh what they call in rhetoric copia you
know this
copiousness that enables them to
translate
i people if they watch me translate for
sheikh abdullah bin bay and i think you
can learn a lot
from from the translations just i'm
talking to the students not you
but you know that you can learn a lot by
listening
to those um because i know
like the minister of opav told me that
he learned quite a bit of english
from listening to them but and and
they're not perfect far
but because i'm familiar and i've
studied most of the subjects that he's
speaking about i do have a sense of
where they go
it's not always the best choice because
a lot
of these scientists like hadith exactly
that is a specifically muslim science
and so to find like or
or or you know
or these are specific technical terms
that are in some ways best left in the
original with
an explanation in a footnote so
those are the two things i think if i
can just ask
an extra question and indeed when you
talk just one extra question if you
allow me of course
and there is another another side of the
problem
it is when you have to translate a uh
an islamic book or an islamic document
from a foreign language into arabic i
i've been tasked to translate a book
from french into
uh into arabic called the invention of
islam
um and the problem was
and it it it spoke about about
hadith so i had to find again
the right uh
hadith that correspond to the french
solution that
french writer has chosen for fabu's
words
so it was quite acrobatic my my my
my last question if if i may do you
believe as a native
english speaker translating from arabic
classic words
works that a non-native has the
instruments to translate classic
works into a foreign language
i think most uh do not like
in order to translate classical texts
you have to have studied within the
tradition
because you'll miss way too much and we
can see it in the orientalist words
many of the orientalists were really
brilliant scholars and they
and they knew arabic to a very high
degree but because they did not study
in the tradition they make egregious
mistakes
egregious mistakes totally agree and
and also they i've noticed a lot of
mistakes with prepositions
um because they're very nuanced
prepositions that's what i say to my
students all the time
i mean i'll give you an example i'll
give you a really good example
i was reading a really good
uh of uh of uh the
seal of uh even jose and that book
has suffered from bad additions it's a
beautiful tafsir it's one of my favorite
tafsirs
and and so i was reading the
introduction to the tipsier
and there was a uh it was about even
jose when he was martyred
he was with uh the el wazir
du li senen and and he he quotes these
lines of poetry and then and and he he
says
he he uses the term amanda kofa
uh in his thing like that you know that
that
to be martyred at ayman al-khufah
like you're giving them a man like you
should use a better word
and then he says he
says
and then the
so he did not see that i
i i couldn't make hide nor hair of what
he was saying because hokama is one of
the names of hell
you know so is it you know
hell is with the people or what i didn't
know what he was saying
it was actually a joomla
it was
they were in a a so that
man who's who's a professor of islamic
uh sciences in mecca completely misread
that he thought it was even jose that
was saying
what i hooked up with next but that was
a joomla
of you know what we'd call a
non-restrictive clause
you know inside embedded in there it
should have had like hyphens
right on on or m dash on on each side
so even people that are really trained
have a hard time
with um and hence we have this massive
tradition you know they say man
you know like so so going in
to
that you have not studied
uh seriously because huge mistakes and
and we can see
the books i you know i see mistakes all
the time so we all even in
iran we're in the problem i'll give you
one
example the first the first place that i
go to
in any translation of quran is um
uh in chapter uh
42 sure verse
11 because it says
you know the first half of the verse is
about uh
as but the second half it says
what is it
i always go to look how and almost
invariably they translate that wow as a
conjunction
and it's not a conjunction it's wow it
is
and so that indicates they don't know
arabic
well enough to be transl
so you're giving allah a method right
so so when you say and yet
and yet you know or or yet
it there has to be some indication that
there's a break
from these two statements
fight that
[Music]
he was a master uh and a beautiful
stylist
was a persian unless we forget he's a
beautiful stylist
some of the greatest scholars of islam
who wrote in arabic
were not native arab speakers uh avasena
who
is not the greatest of
writers uh his style is is not a high
style
um but but he's i mean he he he's one of
the most brilliant human beings and his
his works are very important still
so you know i would i but the cinequa
non for me
is that they have to have studied to a
high level
the subject that they want to translate
uh
into another language and they should
know the other language well enough to
do that because
you know mediocrity the world is filled
with mediocrity but
but to do something really of weight or
worth is not that easy
thank you yes thank you very much
thank you sami for the questions
muhammad zarud please
like um great talk about
um many issues that um we translate
through
with um who was
just um completed his uh questions
uh i have only one comment uh
i hear that um sheikh hamza mentioned
before that um
most translators are supposed to
translate
um into their meta tank and
as far as i know and from a translation
theory perspective uh i would like to
comment on this
issue by saying that um this
issue is um still controversial and
debatable
america i agree i don't have any problem
with that
yeah i'm i've been translating i'm i'm
i'm talking from my own experience and
from what i've seen so it's more
anecdotal than scientific
well yes um i totally agree and um
the the the perspective of those who are
saying that um
translators are supposed to translate
from their mother tank into the um
foreign language is that the most
important step
in translation process is to fully
comprehend
and understand the source text
and their argument is um
it's much easier to understand and
comprehend a text
that's written in your own language and
therefore
once you understood and comprehended the
text
you can um transfer it into the foreign
language
sorry yeah i myself for example i have
two
recently two published uh uh
translations
uh one of them is um available on amazon
it's um entitled um i die
every day 10 lapia short stories or 10
libyan tales
it was translated with a friend of mine
from britain
and we translated this from arabic into
english
and the first draft of the translation
was mine uh
my colleague was only um like revising
the translation
and doing some um like um
proof reading uh
if this is okay so the the argument is
still debatable i wanted
more comments from your site um
i'm glad you brought this up so let me
unpack that a little bit
one i would argue that in in spontaneous
translation
uh when you're doing like uh un type
translation
it's a disaster for somebody
who has a heavy accent to be translating
into a native
tongue another tongue that's not their
native tongue
so for instance uh one of the reasons
sheikh abdullah likes me to translate
into english
is because it's my native tongue and and
and people can understand it we know
social science indicates that 25
of people have a difficult time with
foreign
accents so you're losing one quarter
of of the people in a room when you have
a strong
uh foreign accent and and and this is
palpable like people
people experience this it can also
distract a person
from actually listening to what's being
said
having said that i would say in terms of
classical arabic
it's purely a matter of how well they've
studied and how well
they know the language they're they're
translating into or from
in terms of nobody could
really translate that except a native
egyptian speaker
and i would argue if your books from if
your stories from libya
are are involve dialectical libyan
you know i mean as as i might know what
schminchowick means or something like
that
and or say bahi you know if somebody
asked me from libya
but that that's the extent of my libyan
dialect you know
so i'm not going to attempt to translate
a a a a book of libyan stories
if they're in the libyan dialect if if
if
i can translate al-kharubi and i've done
that
who was a great libyan scholar or al bob
who was a great libyan scholar
i'd feel very comfortable translating
their works
so i think you know i made i made a
blanket statement but that statement
uh has to be unpacked you know and and i
would
i would argue that that it just depends
on
what you're translating and what the
qualifications of the translator
are thank you just to
uh i'm tunisian and libya is next door
and i had to service an assignment
uh so many years ago in libya
uh in a company uh that is working in
public constructions
and i know from the hotel restaurants
that a spoon is called kashyyyk
in libyan dialect and then it was called
by the manager of that company branch
manager
to interpret a conversation between him
and a local libyan engineer
and then the engineer said
we then used the kashyyyk
to do something in the jetty
and really that was a turning point in
my
career in translation because i assume
that i know the libyan dialect quite
well because we were receiving
the transmission of tv
especially during summer time before
satellite
and then luckily i was translating
consecutively means sentence by sentence
like you
prefer and i had the chance to ask the
engineer what do you mean by kashyyyk
and it turned out to be the bulldozer
uh which is another uh meaning of
kashyyyk so with that i give this
a spoon it's like a spoon exactly yeah
that's lifting
the dirt true uh
so this is the culture that we need to
know also to translate but another
question to you
sheikh don't you think that you
um your privilege of you translating
for sheikh bin bayer is that you know
him quite well you travel with him
and so you know your offer
uh not only because you are a native
speaker of
english that the message
is clearly laid down
in english but also you understand you
understand quite well because this is
the first phase
in translation you have to understand
the message what is being said the
nuances
the discourse i mean yeah i studied i've
studied with him for years i've read
books with him
you know i i've had many conversations
with him
i i understand hassaniyah relatively
well s