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  • The Philological Revolution and the Latinization of Arabic

    This article looks at the philological revolution and its influence on Oriental studies and Arabic studies in Germany generally, and on the German philological approach to Arabic studies within the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine in particular. I argue that following this philological surge, the field of Arabic studies within the Jewish community went through a process of “Latinization”—a shift from an Arabic that is connected to daily, social life as a vehicle for communication to an Orientalist textual orientation having three clear principles: emphasis on the study of Arabic grammar, de-Arabization of the field in terms of experts and decision makers, and the treatment of Arabic as a classical language whose value lies in the past. I argue that the study of Arabic was juxtaposed with the study of Latin, which resulted in Arabic being seen not as a “living language” that is heard and used but as a language with mainly historical, religious, and disciplinary values. These Latinized pillars of Arabic studies—alongside additional sociopolitical processes that are beyond the scope of this article—had great influence in shaping the field of Arabic language studies in the Jewish community. I show how the main figures behind this shift were primarily German Jewish scholars who graduated from German universities. These scholars played a dominant role in two central, competing educational spheres in the country, in which the field of Arabic studies was forged and in which new norms of study and knowledge of Arabic were founded: The Hebrew University (where the Institute of Oriental Studies was established) and the school system (led by the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa). This new situation resulted in the creation of a new “Europeanized” Arabic in the heart of the Arab world.

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    Amputated Tongue: On the Potential for Change in a Political Act of Translation

    Be-lashon kruta (Amputated tongue) is a collection of Palestinian prose published by the Maktoobseries in 2019. It is the most comprehensive collection of Palestinian literature ever published in Hebrew, in terms of both quantity and the period covered. It is also the richest collection of its kind in terms of the variety of authors and the most complex in terms of translation methodology. In this article we focus on Be-lashon kruta, its place and importance within the local field of Arabic-to-Hebrew translations, and the new model that lies at its heart: a novel binational and bilingual dialogical approach to Arabic-to-Hebrew translation that addresses a number of lacunas that have accompanied this field. We first focus on the significance of Be-lashon kruta, looking at the collection’s title as both a metaphor and an indication of a broader process and attitude in which the Palestinian voice was not heard and remained unspoken in Hebrew. We then deal with the challenges of asymmetry in translation generally and in the Arabic-to-Hebrew field more particularly. We conclude with a survey of the Maktoob model of translation as an answer to these ongoing lacunas.

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    Guest Editors’ Note: From the Neoclassical to the Binational Model of Translation

    Literary translation—whether a branch within comparative literature, linguistics, hermeneutics, or elsewhere in the academic disciplinary maze—has grown and developed mainly in accordance with the European neoclassical tradition. The previous issue of JLS was dedicated to the critique of the neoclassical model’s supposed transparency and impartial representation of the original source, allegedly trying to reach a “fluent” translation of the original.

    To cope with translation from Arabic to Hebrew under the conditions of the present time, the Translators’ Circle in Maktoob proposes a pragmatic model of translation that transcends the comfort zone and is open to negotiation and a dialogical process of movement and wrestling in a dynamic relationship of dialogue. Although the model is fraught with practical, economic, and empirical difficulties, and is not necessarily pragmatic, it relies on the philosophy of pragmatism, according to which translation is not only a textual achievement but also action in the real world, which seeks to overcome the elements of alienation and degeneration of the individual, nationalistic portrait of translation. The translation turns from a metatext, which is placed behind the text and whose function is to explain and illuminate, into a social text, as a basis for communication and for expression of collective consciousness. In other words, and paraphrasing Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion that language should be studied in and for itself, we argue that translation is not only a thing in and for and of itself but also a communication tool, a byproduct of a comprehensive political process. To this end it expands the concept of intertextuality from hermeneutics to sociology. That is, intertextuality is not just an encounter between textual units, as is commonly the case in the fields of hermeneutics, linguistics, and literature, but also an interactive sociological mechanism based on encounter and reciprocity between people.

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