I am particularly inspired by the combination of my disappointment with developments in Egypt in late November 2012 and my excitement reading E.O. Wilson’s The Future of Life.
- Is there a lack of popular science literature in Arabic in a format accessible to significant segments of the population?
- If so, what texts and what formats would reach the target population?
- What resources are necessary to produce these media?
- Is the benefit to be gained worth the resources to be expended?
I am not qualified to translate these books. I’ve never studied science in Arabic. I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out how to translate anthropocentrism.
Could transforming these books into abridged audio books, accessible in 10-15 minute segments which could be serialized in radio broadcasts and free podcasts, be the best way to introduce these books to wider audiences?
Maybe crowdsourcing could provide the funding. Or even US government grants? Couldn’t one Predator drone pay for Guns, Germs and Steel and Pale Blue Dot? Wouldn’t adoption of the ideas in these books do more for US security than killing some “militant” and the women and children who got in the way? [2013-Feb-12 – Pale Blue Dot has an apparently unauthorized translation into Arabic whose scan is also being distributed freely as an Adobe file.]
I’ve not searched a lot yet, but here’s the beginning of a list of potential resources and partners.
- Kalima translates book analysing Edward Said’s work into Arabic
- UNESCO’s Natural Sciences page in Arabic
- Arabic language publishers “don’t own oil wells“
- Lebanon Eco Movement
- Nature Conservation Egypt
- الإتحاد العربى للتنمية المستدامة والبيئة
- المكبتبة الإفتراضية العلمية العراقية
- GreenProphet.com
- جامعة ذي قار ب
- Meedan.org
I’m using Delicious to keep track of resources which might help. If you wish to add something to this, either send me the link or create the public Delicious link yourself and include this tag: TranslatingPopularScienceToArabic
List of Arabic language publishers
balaghtranslations 
Well, yes, this is a big problem, and one of the primary interests of organizations like Cairo’s new Center for Translation Studies has been to get more scientific literature into Arabic. But it’s expensive to buy rights to new scientific materials…and as Bachar notes, he doesn’t have an oil well. 🙂 So someone needs to support it. Kalima is one tiny project that translates books from all sorts of genres. But how available/accessible are these books?
As you know, great surges forward in knowledge are generally fueled by translations from multiple languages. (Making them available is another problem.)
There COULD be a crowd-sourced effort to translate new science materials into Arabic and make them available cheap… I think a big group effort, headed up by someone enthusiastic, could bear fruit. But still the rights need to be acquired. Titles/journals would need to be decided on. And distribution methods (probably online/digital would be cheapest, although not the most accessible.)
I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts.
And yes, of course one single drone could pay for LOADS of translations. Plus, nobody dies! Win-win-win.
The tricky part would be convincing Americans to sponsor something like this without using ugly Neo-Orientalist tropes to do it.
Or, you know, convincing Gulf Arabs to sponsor it, although they have many different priorities. Or both.
I do want to distinguish between scientific books and popular science books. No researcher in any technical field today can restrict himself/herself to Arabic. He/she has to learn English at least and/or Spanish and/or French and/or German. I’m thinking about books that reach a wide audience. A good US example would be something like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. It presented scientific information to a wide audience and expanded public consciousness of environmentalism. So it’s not worth translating the latest E.O. Wilson papers in the journal Science into Arabic, since the specialist in Egypt or Tunisia is already learning English and reading it in English. We need to translate / broadcast excerpts of his popular science books to spread the ecological consciousness to the wider audiences.
Of course, maybe an Egyptian ecologist is already doing this using rare microorganisms in Red Sea coral reefs rather than Amazonian ants as his/her example.
I think there are good translators to do this job and they can even make more efforts to come up with good translations when it comes to scientific books. But the problem lies in financing such projects. Unfortunately, they finance trivial things at the expense of literature, knowledge, and science. I hope that governments and institutions will give more attention and money to translation.
So how would one commission a translation? Let’s say I’m a publisher, which I’m not. If Amr tells me he could translate Pale Blue Dot, what would be a reasonable fee? is there a standard amount per 1000 words?
I had written to Professor E.O. Wilson about translating the book Future of Life. I received a response from the foreign rights director at Norton, where many of his books have been published. Future of Life is an Knopf imprint. I spoke with the foreign rights department person there.
Both made it clear that they would only deal with publishers.
I wrote with more questions, and here is the response I received:
[…] been discussing translations of popular science books into Arabic. It appears that, at least for Carl Sagan’s books, there’s been more activity than even […]
I want this book to be translated: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-87140-377-3
[…] Fadel at Balagh Translations has been looking at the translation of popular science books into Arabic; he’s found that there are, among other things, a number of unauthorized Carl […]
Hi Ayman- great post and I appreciate what you had to say to @mlynxqualey in her http://arablit.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/when-is-it-okay-to-distribute-unauthorized-translations/ – open knowledge is critical to healthy societies and the same rationale that justifies access to pharma should pertain to scientific knowledge – at Meedan we have always pushed against fair use as a justification for translating important content. Meedan is a partner in the State Dept / Arab League ‘Open Book’ initiative and I can speak some to the goals of that project. The strategy is to address texts that are not in copyright – projects like the Rice University Open Stax textbooks. I would, however, love to see the project also address popular science titles like OE Wilson, working through a publisher in region to secure translation rights to these titles. I will email with details.