Translation From English To Arabic
Hedy Madrid
Independent judges select the award winning translation, which have been published by Syracuse University Press from 2007-2015 as part of its prestigious Middle East Literature in Translation series, and by the University of Arkansas Press.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is perhaps the greatest surviving work of early Mesopotamian literature. According to legend, Gilgamesh built the city walls of Uruk, modern-day Iraq, to protect his people from external threats. Although the epic records events from more than four thousand years ago, those events echo many of the social and cultural concerns of Iraq today.
Ghareeb Iskander is an Iraqi poet living in London. He has published numerous collections of poems, including A Chariot of Illusion. His critical work includes Semiotic Trends in the Critique of Arab Poetry.
Samih Al-Qasim was a critically acclaimed poet, essayist, and journalist. An outspoken advocate of Palestinian rights, he was imprisoned several times for his writing. He published numerous poetry collections, including Sadder Than Water: New and Selected Poems, the only other book-length English translation of his work.
Qassim Haddad is a Bahraini poet, notable within the Arab world for his free verse poetry. He has published more than a dozen collections of poetry and works of critical prose, and a memoir. His poems have been translated into several languages including German, English, and French.
John Verlenden is a writing instructor in the Department of Rhetoric and Composition at the American University in Cairo. He is the co-translator, along with Ferial Ghazoul, of Rama and the Dragon: An Egyptian Novel.
Mahmoud Saeed, a prominent Iraqi novelist, has written more than twenty novels and short story collections. He was imprisoned several times and left Iraq in 1985 after the authorities banned the publication of some of his novels, including Zanka bin Baraka (1970), which won the Ministry of Information Award in 1993.
Samuel Salter has lived and traveled in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East. He has worked as a teacher and a translator. Under the pseudonyms Sam Reaves and Dominic Martell, he has published ten novels.
As both mature they find outside events encroaching upon their sheltered lives, forcing each to confront challenges to their youthful ideologies. Ashraf is chastened by an economic turnaround that takes him to the United States as an impoverished immigrant, and Wafaa begins to question her rigid fundamentalist beliefs that seem increasingly inadequate to make sense of the complex world around her.
Reem Bassiouney is an acclaimed contemporary Arabic writer. She has published five novels in the Middle East including The Smell of the Sea. She is assistant professor of Arabic at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
The 2005 winner of the The Arkansas Arabic Translation Award, sponsored by the King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Arkansas and the University of Arkansas Press, though written in the nineteenth century, is a richly contextualized precursor of modern Muslim wrestlings with notions of democracy and constitutionalism. Translated by the distinguished Middle East historian L. Carl Brown, this important historical work is now available to English language readers for the first time.
His work was a history with a thesis. Bin Diyaf sought to show the need for his country, and for that matter the larger Ottoman world, to adopt representative and responsive forms of government as existed in Europe.
His purpose was most clearly set out in the Muqaddima or Introduction to his monumental work, which Brown has translated. The ideas produced in this text roughly a century and a half ago were not institutionalized, but they did catch hold as ideas and goals influencing later developments.
Jabbour Douaihy is a novelist and professor of French literature in the Lebanese University. Among his publications are the novels Rayya of the River, The Forest Soul, and a collection of short stories, Dying between Relatives Is Sleeping, all in Arabic. Autumn Equinox is the first of his novels to be translated into English.
Nay Youssef Hannawi received her B.A. in English at the American University in Beirut and an M.F.A. in literary translation from the University of Arkansas. She lives in Kuwait where she works as a translator and teaches English at Kuwait University.
Idris Ali is the author of three short story collections and another novel, Explosion of a Skull. Self-taught in literature, he attended the Cairo Religious Institute of Al-Azhar and currently lives in Cairo, Egypt.
Ghada Samman is Lebanese, was born in Damascus, Syria, and currently lives in Paris, France, with her husband, Bashir. She was educated in English literature at Damascus University and the American University in Beirut. She now owns her own publishing company. Ms. Samman has written a total of twenty-eight books in a variety of genres and has been translated into nine languages.
Issa J. Boullata is a professor of Arabic Literature and Language at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Born in Jerusalem in 1929, he is a United States citizen, educated at the University of London, recipientof numerous awards and recognitions, and author of several books in both Arabic and English.
Improvisations on a Missing String tells the story of Saada Rayyis, who, after a mastectomy and prior to another operation which she may not survive, considers the course of her life with the purpose of understanding not only where she has been, but also where she is going. In her attempt to cope with complex feelings of alienation and insecurity, she struggles against traditional expectations in order to secure a sense of belonging and fulfillment - but always on her own terms.
From her childhood in Palestine, through her university studies in Cairo, and finally as a teacher in Beirut, we follow the development of this independent woman as she comes to terms with her feelings about family, lovers, politics, art, and finally her own aspirations for belonging.
In a search through the lore of war-ravaged Lebanon, Elias Khoury weaves tales within tales. Among them are the stories of a Lebanese monk murdered in Jerusalem; of Faysal, an eleven-year-old Palestinian boy who witnesses the massacre of his parents, brothers, and sisters; of a friendship between an Arab and a Jew who meet in New York City; and of Widad, "the Circassian," a girl kidnapped from her village in Azerbaijan and sold as a maid in Beirut to Iskander Naffaa, who subsequently falls in love with her and abandons everything to marry her.
The novel takes place beside the Dead Sea and on the hills of Jerusalem, in the streets of Beirut, in the remote mountain villages of Lebanon, and in the alleys of Shatilla Refugee Camp. With every setting, Khoury elicits the legends and folk tales of the surroundings, tapping events from the turbulent history of the Middle East to divine the ways in which truths become myths and stories. To Khoury's narrator, these stories eventually grow to signify much more than the reality he lives day to day.
Ghada Samman is Lebanese, was born in Damascus, Syria, and currently lives in Paris, France, with her husband, Bashir. She was educated in English literature at Damascus University and the American University in Beirut. She now owns her own publishing company. Ms. Samman has written a total of twenty-eight books in a variety of genres and has been translated into nine languages.
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Machine translation for low-resource languages poses significant challenges, primarily due to the limited availability of data. In recent years, unsupervised learning has emerged as a promising approach to overcome this issue by aiming to learn translations between languages without depending on parallel data. A wide range of methods have been proposed in the literature to address this complex problem. This paper presents an in-depth investigation of semi-supervised neural machine translation specifically focusing on translating Arabic dialects, particularly Egyptian, to Modern Standard Arabic. The study employs two distinct datasets: one parallel dataset containing aligned sentences in both dialects, and a monolingual dataset where the source dialect is not directly connected to the target language in the training data. Three different translation systems are explored in this study. The first is an attention-based sequence-to-sequence model that benefits from the shared vocabulary between the Egyptian dialect and Modern Arabic to learn word embeddings. The second is an unsupervised transformer model that depends solely on monolingual data, without any parallel data. The third system starts with the parallel dataset for an initial supervised learning phase and then incorporates the monolingual data during the training process.
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